


Anabasis

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Dreams, F/F, Major Character Undeath, Metaphysical Claptrap, Mystery, Post-Season/Series 03, Tarot, myths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-08-31 05:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 57,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8566348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: It is a year later and Laura and Carmilla are pulled from their new life in Paris by a combination of disturbing dreams and a tarot card that keeps turning up in Perry's hands. But Perry and LaFontaine have been dreaming too - of footsteps on the stairs and figures on the beach, all getting closer, all asking the question: Who is this who is coming?And there is somebody familiar reflected in the mirror where Perry's face should be - somebody who should be very much dead.





	1. The Hanged Man

**Author's Note:**

> _The way up and the way down are one and the same_ \- Heraclitus

The second hand ticked its way towards twelve. Lola Perry stood half-crouched over the oven with her hands gloved and eyes on the clock. When it was two seconds before midday, she pulled on the door handle and removed the tray of pastries so that they emerged at precisely noon. One of them stuck, but that was all right because she always baked two more than the order required. The broken one was for lunch.

The little crinkled stars set with apricot jam cooled while she sorted out the order book. Black ink for orders, green ink for payments received, red ink for expenses. She ticked off the little box next to the words _Tuesday July 12th 2016. J. Kohl_. Tuesdays were usually quiet, so this had been a welcome order.

Six dozen Danish pastries, twelve of them still slightly warm, in a white box marked _Lola Perry, Luxury Baking and Catering_. It wasn't much of a business yet, but she had a few regular customers already and had heard nothing but praise so far.

Jan rang the doorbell at twenty-five minutes to one. Lola had the receipt already made up on notepaper. He called her 'Miss Perry'. Everyone here did, these days. She had been Perry for so long it seemed pointless to ask anyone to call her Lola as she did in her head – and yet there was nobody here to introduce her as Perry as LaFontaine had done at Silas. So she introduced herself to people as Lola Perry, and they took the reluctance to use her first name as a reserve they should respect.

She ate her lunch sitting at the spotless dining table and avoided even touching the cards until she had quite finished with the Brie. They had become her guilty ritual for after lunch. After clearing up she laid them out one by one in the centre of the cleared board.

On the left, which represented the past, was the Queen of Wands. She tried not to take it too personally. This little diversion in the early afternoon was a sop to the naïve days before Silas when she had worn spangly jewellery, carried a shop-bought wand and hoped to commune with the infinite. But she knew now that tarot cards were completely random and so could not be blamed for the occasional moment of apt symbolism.

On the right, for the future, were the Lovers. And wouldn’t that be nice if it were true - although preferably in a less heteronormative sense than that depicted in her deck. In the illustration, a serpent coiled behind Eve’s back. She could believe that part at least.

At the top of the little cross of cards was the ally. She turned it over to find the Two of Swords – a blindfolded figure sitting on a beach with a weapon in each hand. Now, perhaps that could be LaFontaine. Their blindfold was actually an eyepatch and covered only one eye, but this was possibly near enough for cartomancy.

On the bottom was the adversary and she was entirely unsurprised to find the Wheel of Fortune. It was reversed - turned upside down when she’d dealt it onto the table - but in this case it didn’t matter for the purposes of interpretation. After all, wheels are the same whichever way you look at them.

She hesitated before turning over the fifth card, right in the middle of the cross. The centre marked the governing influence and it turned out to be the Hanged Man. He was reversed as well – which meant in a sense that he was the right way up. The picture on the card was a man with a halo around his head, suspended upside down from a T-shaped cross by one foot. The other leg hung loose and folded in at the knee. In the upside-down card on Lola’s table, the man seemed to stand upright on one leg, dancing against a wooden stake as if rejoicing in his fate.

This was difficult to interpret. The card – at least according to the short booklet included when she bought it, which the teenage Lola had regarded as the font of ancient occult wisdom – could refer to either a traitor or martyrdom. So perhaps reversing it could be read as loyalty and resurrection – or was that too simplistic?

She tapped the table in abstraction. It was a quarter past one and she didn’t need to do anything until the minute hand had made its way right back up to the top again. She gathered the cards together and shuffled them for a second dealing.

This time the past was marked by the Nine of Swords, whose abject weeping figure was hardly less on the nose than the Queen of Wands had been in the previous circle. The future now saw the Two of Pentacles, a pair of little coins bound together in a looping infinity symbol. Her ally was the Eight of Swords, another blindfolded figure, bound and hopeless in the middle of a wasteland. Blindfolds again. She was conscious that she hadn’t spoken to LaFontaine for a couple of days. They were in the middle of experiment-related isolation and all lines of communication were down.

The adversary was Judgement, reversed. Grey figures stood up from stone tombs to greet a trumpeting angel, but all was upside down in her fortune. Finally she flipped over her new governor and found the Hanged Man reversed once more.

Lola frowned and totted up the figures in her head. The possibilities: 78 cards, with two positions each. The odds were one in one hundred and fifty six to draw the Hanged Man Reversed on any particular deal. This might seem add up to something like one in twenty-thousand to draw it twice, but this was actually an illusion of significance due to calculating odds after the fact. The odds of drawing any previously unknown card twice in a row were back at one hundred and fifty-six to one, because you didn’t fix the card’s identity until after you’d seen it for the first time. She might not be a scientist, but her maths had always been reasonably good – the sense of order appealed to her.

Nothing to feel a tingling sense of alarm about but she had been feeling anxious about everything even slightly abnormal for a year now - ever since she crawled out of that pit wearing the Dean’s clothes. She gathered the cards together and shuffled them properly. She closed her eyes and pulled the top one off the pack, slapping it onto the wooden table with more force than she intended. When she opened her eyes, the dancing figure of the Hanged Man reversed jeered at her.

Three times. Her calculator was sitting on top of her account books – it gave her odds of precisely twenty-four thousand, three hundred and thirty-six to one for the sequence. To get it a fourth time would be over three million to one. That wouldn’t happen.

She broke the pack in two and rippled the segments together. This time she withdrew the top card and placed it unseen on the bottom, just in case. She drew again from the top, and turned the bright pasteboard in her hand without placing it down.

The Hanged Man. He was head over heels in her hand.

* * *

LaFontaine pulled the descender on their harness and slipped slowly down the rope to land smoothly on the warehouse floor. The complex gantry above them was criss-crossed with wire connectors and parabolic mirrors. Above their head, the ceiling of the warehouse opened up into a square hole in the middle where they had installed a retracting roof. It was amazing how often it came in useful.

It was night time already, but the stars were not yet showing clearly. That was a disadvantage of living near the city, but one to be weighed against the usefulness of having nearby equipment manufacturers, a university full of contacts, and Chinese takeaways.

They freed themselves of the harness straps and took up position in the middle of the control panels. There were geometric displays on the screens in front of them, and every component of the vast net of struts and mirrors had its own servo loop. They performed the basic calibrations, the rig deforming carefully like some great spider shuffling around. On the cement floor of the laboratory was a precisely delineated star symbol in a wide circle.

The doors were locked and sealed. All electronic equipment other than the experiment was shut down for the duration of operation. As a result they had mostly been eating cold pizza for two days, although blow-torching the topping to reheat was a new invention in culinary science that needed further exploration. 

There was a chime from the main control panel and a row of lights lit up. Gemini was becoming visible as the night faded to black outside - the star Pollux lit up on the telescoping display. LaFontaine began focusing the mirror array. Castor wasn’t yet visible, but it was possible to predict fairly accurately how long it would take in prevailing conditions, and from that the first appearance of all the stars in the constellation. They set the gantries to a provisional time for activity.

It took over an hour for the second bank of lights to come online. LaFontaine paced around their experiment, noting with a critical eye the parts that could be improved. They checked for the thousandth time the arrangement of paint on the floor. That could not be so accurately predicted as the astronomical world – they were now in the realm of the mystical and the superstitious.

The mystical – or whatever you wanted to call it – was of course nothing more significant than an area of knowledge not yet sufficiently explored. People had discovered, once, that certain almost magical events happened at particular times and concluded it was the influence of gods in heaven. Later thinkers had proved that to be superstition. Even later, rather more subtle thinkers had pointed out what should have been obvious to their forebears: misinterpreted mechanisms for inexplicable events required there to be _something_ to misinterpret in the first place. Granted, events at Silas the previous year suggested that there really were some powerful being running around that might plausibly be called gods, but this is what needed investigating.

Myth is insufficiently analysed science. And they were really good at analysis.

One of the rig legs looked a little out of alignment, so they retrieved a tape measure from the pocket of their leather waistcoat to check. Judging distances by eye was not so reliable these days, not since they'd lost one down at the gate of the Underworld. Depth perception was lacking. Laser replacements were under development, but so far no working prototype. The gantry leg was fine, and they were putting the tape measure away when the final bank of lights started into life and the machine started operation.

It was all about focus. Astrologers and soothsayers had generally agreed that the position of the stars had an influence on the world below. What they had never tried to do, so far as LaFontaine's research indicated, was tap that directly. After all, the stars changed depending on where you were on Earth. Which meant - for a start - that by changing one's position, one could modulate the effect. Or, as in this case, perhaps you could latch on to a signal and focus it. Concentrate it. Do something meaningful instead of drawing up charts of one's inevitable fate.

The rig deformed. Above them, the array of mirrors panned in their fixtures and the floor with its eight-pointed star sigil rose. At each elevation, the image of Gemini was projected onto the floor and a battery of sensors recorded the field disturbances. They noted on one screen that there seemed to be a strong resonance in the zero-point field when the image was twice the size of the detector sigil.

The computers captured the data. There would be trawling through looking for patterns tomorrow to find out what, if anything, could be learned. But in the meantime it was after midnight and they'd been working since the morning. 

Belatedly they remembered the need to call Perry now that electronics were usable, but she'd be in bed by now. As should they be. Half of the warehouse was converted into living quarters and they hit the bed without even checking their phone. Sleep came quickly with its subroutines of dreams.

They were ten years old again and Perry had found a Magic Eye book.

“You need to look specially,” she said. Susan – they were 'Susan' in those days, but even in the dream it felt odd – looked at her skeptically.

“How do you look 'specially'?” they asked, and screwed up their eye to squint at the pages of featureless textured colour.

Perry took the book out of their hands. “Not like that! You have to unfocus your eye. Like this.” She relaxed, and moved the book gently forward and back until the image jumped out at her and she smiled. “It's a face!”

“Let me try.” They tried to relax their vision, to see into the page rather than scan along its surface. There should have been a hidden three-dimensional image in there somewhere, appearing stereographically to those who had learned the technique. “I can't.”

“Maybe it's because you've got an eyepatch on,” suggested Perry. Susan remembered that this was true, so they swapped the patch over and looked with the other eye. This made sense somehow, in the way that things do in dreams.

“No,” they admitted after the second attempt. “Nothing.”

“Maybe you need both eyes to see him, then,” Perry suggested, and then stiffened. 

“What is it?”

“Someone's coming up the stairs,” she whispered.

Susan listened. The footsteps weren't clear. “Jeep, is that you?” they asked, and then felt a stab of pain when they remembered that it couldn't be because JP was dead.

“Who is this who is coming?” Perry echoed. “Who is this who is coming?” She said it again and again, the emphasis falling on different syllables, until the words lost meaning.

“Who is this who is coming?” LaFontaine said aloud, waking themselves up in a tangle of blankets. Their laboratory was silent, but they lay there listening to the hush anyway. Just in case the lost JP Armitage really was just around the corner.

* * *

The door of the apartment flew open and Laura tumbled in, followed in short order by Carmilla. She skidded slightly on the tiled floor and steadied herself by catching the door handle and pulling it closed. They were laughing, and Carmilla tried once more to grab hold of her.

“Can't catch me!” Laura skipped behind the sofa and feinted left and right. Carmilla tossed their programmes onto a table. She bent forward, rested her hands on her thighs.

“Don't give yourself airs, cupcake. I catch you all the time.”

“Hmm, am I believing that?” Laura mimed an exaggeration thinking expression. “Pretty sure you only catch me when I take pity on you and let you.”

It was Laura's new game, needling her humanised girlfriend. She was fit and ran for exercise. Carmilla, on the other hand, had relied on supernatural strength for three centuries and was finding the concept of regular practice a bit much. And anyway, running always seemed to happen in the morning and some habits hadn't gone away.

“Time was, I could make it to the solarium with a bottle from the cellar before you even got to the second landing.”

It was true, and certainly something worth remembering during private moments, but Laura couldn't let her rest on past laurels. “Yeah, but – what have you done recently?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Carmilla sidled closer and laid a hand on the sofa back. “I did that thing in the Jardins de Tuileries...”

“Oh. Oh yeah. You did.” Laura flushed, and the memory rendered her temporarily unable to form proper sentences. Carmilla drifted closer and pressed her advantage.

“Seem to recall you were very out of breath afterwards,” she purred. “Could hardly get up, let alone run anywhere...”

Laura remembered. “I'm sure I paid you back for that, though.”

“Oh yes.”

She leant into the kiss. Carmilla's hands held her face gently but only for a moment, before she decided she had better things to do with them. It suddenly became both highly urgent to make it to somewhere comfortable and equally impossible to let go of Carmilla for more than half a second. 

They meandered through their apartment, slowly because stopping every few steps for another kiss or to remove another piece of clothing. Around them was the litter of their lives: half-empty boxes of cerisettes, loosely discarded silk scarves, programmes from the Palais Garnier. Carmilla kicked open the bedroom door before being revolved on the spot and tumbled in backwards.

They made love. Love can't sit there like a stone, it has to be made and remade, made new. They had made themselves new in this apartment for nearly a year now, and the sight of Carmilla's face flushed with blood pounding from her beating heart was a sight she could not tire of.

When they were entirely tired out, Laura lay in bed with her arms wrapped around Carmilla and her face pressed against the back of her neck, breathing in her scent. She fell freely into dreams.

“Mirror mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?” she asked.

“That would be us, cupcake.” Carmilla sat cuddling her from behind. Their faces appeared side by side in the great scrollwork-bordered mirror. Behind them was the coppery sky and pointed minarets of Istanbul. The setting sun off the Golden Horn filled their room with honey-coloured light.

“No, the mirror's got to choose,” Laura teased. “And it's going to choose me!” Carmilla nipped her on the shoulder and she squealed in protest.

“Nope,” she said. “Both of us. It has to be both of us together.”

Laura breathed a theatrical sigh. “Well, if you say so. I suppose I can see the argument there.” She peered into the part of the glass which reflected the city roofs beyond their balcony. “There's something behind us,” she said.

And indeed there was, a black bird flapping its way languidly towards their high room. It grew bigger and bigger, but in the dream Carmilla and Laura did not turn around. They only stared at their faces as the crow grew to cover and then obliterate the sight of the balcony behind them.

“Now, who is this who is coming?” asked Laura. She twitched her head, but Carmilla tugged her back to stare straight ahead, seeing only in the mirror as the flapping shape warped and became a human figure.

She gasped as the reflected eyes met hers. The woman was covered in spatters and streaks of blood, her eyes burning alternately with anger and reproach.

“Don't you want to turn around?” asked Danny Lawrence. She had hints of tears in her eyes, glinting in the golden light. “You need to see, Hollis.”

Laura felt the trembling build inside her. She shook her head tightly. Danny's face twitched, an the angry sneering vampire she'd briefly become broke through. “Look at me!” she snarled. “Say my name! Answer! Who is _this_ who is coming?” She hooked her nails into her top and tore it apart to reveal the gaping hole in her chest, shattered ribs and a rent heart not beating.

Laura woke crying out and fighting Carmilla's arms.

* * *

Lola lay in bed and stressed mentally, having long ago run out of ways to stress physically. LaFontaine wasn’t answering calls or text messages. Admittedly they had sent her a message at the weekend saying they were going into isolation for a few days as part of an experiment, but that just left Lola with one more thing to worry about. Their experiments were rarely to be described as safe. She had asked them to come as soon as possible. She had put the cards away at the back of a cupboard after the fourth appearance of the Hanged Man and not looked at them since. Everything in her house was now exceptionally clean even by her standards.

At times like this she understood it to be very empty. All the unoccupied guest rooms were brooding absences, with her friends far away, or involved in crazy experiments, or wrapped up in each other. Slowly, unwillingly, sleep claimed her. Dreams came eventually, first in confused huddles and murmurs, and only later in coherent scenes.

She was on a beach. Her feet pressed down into waterlogged sand and each gentle wave lapped at her toes without reaching her ankles. The sand was dark and slightly muddy. Here and there around her fading footprints were the squiggles of worm castings. Light cloud in the sky, such a light grey as to be practically white, marked by the squiggled silhouettes of gulls calling above her. Everywhere the smell of salt. To her left was a broken scarp. The rock was halfway to being sand already, and it had broken and washed out into a low but sharp slope of gritty soil. 

She walked, following the wetted fringe of the land and sea. Her feet sank in to the sand with each step, and she had to tug gently to free them. Looking back, her prints slowly decayed into flatness as the sludgy ground flowed back. She spread her arms and let the white sleeves she wore flap in the breeze. It was pleasantly cool.

She placed each foot gently on the sand, watching it crack as the pressure squeezed water away. And then the finger-thick sheet of saltwater covering it, sucking her toes under before she pulled them out for the next step. The sand was flat before her, nobody having passed this way and left a trace before.

Behind her, in one of her backwards glances at her disappearing trail, was a smudge. A bobbing black object, like a person running uncertainly forward. She stared. It flapped, and seemed to rise and collapse, as if it were a great bundle of cloth being lifted by the wind and then dropped. But when it rose, it had the likeness of a figure and when it collapsed it was empty. She did not like it.

Lola hurried on. She stopped regarding the texture of beach and waves and began scanning the scarp to her left for a way up. After a few dozen steps like this she looked back again. The flapping creature had drawn closer. She could see now that it was certainly in human form. When it rose and drove forward there were legs and arms and a head, but it was all indistinct. It had the appearance of somebody pressing through from the other side of a wide veil of cloth. But in moments of sharper breeze or slower advance the form would collapse and the cloth deflate around its absence.

She ran, and then she ran faster, stumbling now and again as she slipped or caught her feet in the damp ground. As she ran her sleeves flapped out around her and her skirts whirled. The chasing thing gained ground, apparently unable to slip or fall. Desperately she strained ahead for an escape, but then the sky to each side was swamped by flying sleeves and frayed hems.

It caught her. The flapping wings of the cloth folded around her, and she felt with shock and sudden horror that it was not empty, that there had been a person pursuing her all this time, fading in and out of the veil. Its hands were cold even through the rough fabric, and as she struggled they seized her and turned her around.

The face that pressed through the suffocating black wrap had sucked-in eyes and a mouth that was a hollow. It clawed at her, pressing itself forward and the last light blinked out as she was wrapped entirely in the shroud. 

Inside, rather than out. And she stared through the thick, but not entirely opaque, cloth as her pursuer stepped back and left her as the one swaddled in the dark veil. Vaguely she blundered towards her captor. She couldn't see the face, but she heard the words hissed in her ear as she woke up to find herself tangled in blankets and sweating in fear.

“Well now - who is this who is coming?”


	2. The Echoes Return Slow

Lola sat at her kitchen table in the morning sun. There was a bright four-sided patch of white light cast from the window and she carefully placed her cup right in the middle of it so that everything was symmetrical. Her phone was also on the table, properly aligned and parallel with the edges so that she wouldn’t miss any messages.

It was quite early, and the sound of children being walked to school hadn’t quite begun in earnest yet. LaFontaine had texted her already, saying that they’d be over to say hello now that their experiment was over. They must have set an alarm especially to be up this soon, which meant they’d not wanted Lola to be waiting around all day feeling tense. That was nice.

She didn’t know quite how she felt today. There had been the cards yesterday, and then the creepy dream. But on the other hand, that was yesterday. Today was a very nice morning and her best friend was coming. She would talk to LaFontaine and they would explain how there was some well-known bias in shuffling packs of cards that meant you were actually quite likely to draw the Hanged Man four times in a row. Because of how many cards you could shuffle at a time or something. And then she’d laugh and feel better and tell them about the dream and everything would be fine again. Hopefully.

The clock on the wall ticked and the tick filled the house. It was very quiet inside. Birds were singing outside, but the walls of her house were thick and only a muffled song came through to her. She looked out onto her back garden and compared the red roses in the left hand flowerbed to the white roses in the right hand flowerbed. The white ones seemed to be doing better, which might have to do with whether they got most sun in the morning or in the afternoon. She wasn't sure. The bushes had been there when she'd moved in and this was the first summer she'd seen the garden bloom.

It was a good house: large enough to accommodate plenty of visitors, but not so large that you could get lost in it. Most of her share of the Dean’s money had gone on it - once the lawyers had stopped arguing over the various interpretations of the principle ‘heirs of the body’ and just divided the cursed estate between herself and Carmilla. Most of the rest had gone to charity. She had also insisted on paying for the student memorial at Silas herself, although she hadn’t gone to its unveiling and had never actually seen it.

From out the front came the muffled sound of a door opening and shutting and a child stamping up and down a garden path. The neighbours were on their way to school.

“Mummy, is a _pirate_!” cried an excited girl, her glee cutting through walls and distance the way children’s voices do when they want to be loud. Lola sat up in her chair and then the doorbell rang.

LaFontaine turned back from winking at the neighbour’s daughter and her embarrassed mother when Lola opened the door. They tapped the eyepatch over their empty socket cheerfully.

“A real conversation starter, this,” they said by way of greeting. “But only with people under the age of twelve. Morning Perr.”

“Weirdo.”

Lola let them in and gave them as much of a hug as the obstructions of doorway and coat stand would allow. They went through, and she retrieved one of LaFontaine’s particular mugs from the cupboard. It had the Periodic Table on it.

“How was the experiment?”

“Oh, good I think. The computers are still running the analysis, but I reckon we got a decent stash of data. Will probably see some time tomorrow.” They took a long swig of tea. “Got much baking today?”

“Not a huge amount. There’s a shop in town that wants giant strawberry meringues, so I’ll do those in the afternoon. On that subject, do you fancy helping me separate three hundred eggs?”

She opened the door to her little larder and revealed a crate on the floor filled with dozens of catering-size egg boxes. LaFontaine laughed. “Yeah, why not? If you’ve got a decent playlist. Can you dance and split eggs at the same time?”

“With your sense of rhythm, probably not.” She stuck out her tongue. “But I bought three dozen spares, so you’re welcome to try.”

It actually proved more workable than she expected. You had to jiggle around a bit anyway, throwing the yolk from one half of shell to another, so doing it rhythmically wasn’t a huge stretch. Rap, however, proved something of a disaster and after three unwanted incidents of flying yolks she intervened in favour of classic rock.

“You know you can just buy egg whites, right?” LaFontaine said. “Like, in bottles.”

“You know if I tell my customers I make everything by hand from raw ingredients I can charge twice as much?” she replied. It was true. “Besides, three hundred egg yolks makes a lot of confectioner’s custard for tomorrow’s pastries.”

The rows of giant mixing bowls were filled one by one. Lola began to feel much better.

“How did you sleep after all your excitement?” she asked when she had got up the nerve.

She expected this to be answered with a vague positive followed by LaFontaine asking her the same question. But instead they frowned a bit and put down the egg they were about to break. “Kind of weirdly,” they said. “Dunno, had an odd dream and then I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. We were up in the attic back home – you know, where we used to hide when we were kids – and doing a Magic Eye book. Well, I couldn’t do it because of the eyepatch. And then someone was coming up the stairs and you kept asking who it was. The same question again and again.”

Lola felt a serpent coiling at the bottom of her stomach. She very carefully sat down first. “What question?” she asked.

“Who is this who is coming?” quoted LaFontaine. “It was – Perr? Are you- You’re not okay, are you?”

She was clutching herself and the shaking would not stop.

* * *

Laura climbed out of bed and resented the fact. She felt unrested. Carmilla was up already, a highly unusual state of affairs and one which deprived her of the normal morning cuddles and everything that followed on from them. She wandered into the bathroom and put the shower on to be as hot as physically bearable. Her shoulders were pulled unpleasantly tight and somewhere behind her eyes was the beginning of a headache.

Steaming water and shampoo smelling of citrus peel helped relieve some of the tension and bring her back into a resemblance of cheerfulness. There was bright morning sunlight lighting up the cream carpet with dashes, and the sounds of Paris were clear and happy when she turned off the shower and opened the window to let them in. The night began to fade away behind her. July in Paris, on holiday from university with nothing to do except swan around in the sunlight and choose cafes to eat omlettes in. What did night of disturbed dreams matter?

She went through into their bedroom and picked out clothes for a summer day wandering by the banks of the Seine. Something with a floaty top, cool linen for the hot part of the day. Carmilla had taken to sketching over the past year and she had taken to posing for the sketches. A debate over her hair – braid or no braid? - and Laura turned to her reflection for advice.

She stared into the mirror, trying to decide, before the details of the dream of last night broke through the surface of her memory. The cryptic conversation. Danny’s betrayed face. Danny’s broken body. She shut her eyes and tried to stop the memory before it pushed through.

A body she'd seen outside of dreams twice now, and neither time could be forgotten. People always came to remind her. She’d had to meet Danny’s parents in the spring holidays. It was the anniversary of their daughter’s death – of her first death, the second one having been swept to one side by mutual agreement – and it had brought everything back up to the surface after the honeymoon period of her new life with Carm.

Mrs Lawrence – tall, American, hair so painfully familiar – had enfolded Laura in a hug at first sight. She’d watched all the videos, of course. She thanked Laura again and again for helping her daughter, for being her friend, for holding her in her last moments. Laura found herself growing sicker and sicker under the words. Because it was only on the first time that Danny had died in her arms. The second time, she had died in the pit and her body lay undiscovered until the Austrian soldiers had scoured all the tunnels. 

She’d had ‘her own things to take care of’, as she’d said after dropping Kirsch off. Later they reconstructed those things.

Danny had gone down into the pit and mounted a one-woman assault on the Corvae forces in an attempt to free the Summers and other students. She told nobody, worked alongside nobody, and the exhausted and helpless Summers were at a loss at her sudden change of heart. The Corvae forces were largely stood down in preparation for the Dean's ritual, and so she was able to carve her way through several detachments before they realised that something was going on in the upper levels. Apparently they'd been informed that any trouble would take place lower down, by the seventh gate.

Three floors of imprisoned students were left uncomprehending that they were suddenly free. Corvae reinforcements were slow to come through the access tunnels from their camp – so slow to come that everything down by the entrance to the Underworld had already happened by the time they did. Laura and Carmilla were walking in the sun, the battle was over, the Jagdcommando were in sight. But none of them knew it, and they kept fighting.

They had staked her eventually, before returning to the surface and being disarmed by the Austrian troops. So Danny had died a second time, and Laura understood it to be her fault again. She'd let her leave. Two deaths, and the second for no more reason than the first.

Mr Lawrence, a reserved and lightly-bearded Scotsman, had pressed into her hands a little silver-framed photograph. It had lived on the mantelpiece for a week before Laura put it away. Carmilla made no comment on its placement or removal. 

She found it today in her bedside drawer, stuffed to the back along with her passport and a watch that didn’t work anymore. Danny’s smiling face in the summer before her third year. A few weeks before she met Laura and started on the path to her death. Laura threw it back and shoved the drawer closed. She tried to breath. She hated these pointless spirals of guilt, and hated them all the more because recognizing them as pointless didn’t help get rid of them. Three deep breaths and she steadied herself in the moment. You can't change things that have happened, Hollis, she told herself. You did enough wallowing in regrets last year in the Library to last you a lifetime.

Outside, a Parisian conformed to stereotype for the good of the tourists and accordion music drifted into the bedroom. She pulled herself together and went to find Carmilla. 

“Morning.” Laura's thoughts were jolted out of her mind. Carmilla was sprawling in one of the chairs. There were roses in the centre of the table and around them a spread for an elaborate breakfast: croissants, brioche, pastries, pots of jam, butter, cheese, ham -

“Carm!” Laura felt her heart unclench as she planted a kiss on Carmilla's cheek. “You did breakfast?”

“Thought you'd need something nice.” She rose, and Laura discovered with a blush that 'something nice' apparently included her girlfriend in an untied silk dressing gown and not much else. “Coffee?”

“Uh. Yeah. Coffee sounds good.” She sat down and tried to figure out a way to neatly break open a croissant and apply raspberry jam without taking her eyes off the way the light caught Carmilla's shoulder where the printed burgundy fabric slipped away from it.

“Want to talk about it?” Carmilla tapped a spoonful of coffee into the press and turned to face her.

“Not really.”

“You seemed pretty cut up there.”

Laura remembered the lacerations on Danny's chest. “I'm fine.” She focused on the smooth, undamaged skin of Carmilla's midriff right here with her now.

“Clearly.” Carmilla put a cup in front of her, and squeezed her hand in silent reassurance. Now and again they both had nightmares. They took turns at comforting.

To avoid the questions, Laura flicked through her phone. There were the two obligatory messages from her father – one listing family and neighbour gossip, and one an update on substances recently discovered to have carcinogenic properties. There was also a message from Perry.

_Hello Laura, hope you're well and Carmilla liked the new exhibition at wherever it was. How have your dreams been lately? Does the question 'who is this who is coming?' sound familiar at all? Even if it doesn't, can you please tell me as soon as possible so I can stop worrying. Perry xxx_

“Anything interesting?”

Laura stared at the screen, wanting it to be gone. Perry's precise, lengthy text - full punctuation and capitalisation as always – left no room for mistakes. Wordlessly she handed the phone to Carmilla.

“Cupcake? Do I take it that does sound familiar?” Laura nodded. There was a lump in her throat. “Last night?” Nod. “Okay. Well. Fuck.”

“It was Danny,” she said. “I had the nightmare? It was Danny. Dead. And she said it.”

Carmilla's arms encircled her. They breathed together. After a while she said, “I think we should go see the curly one, cutie.”

She whisked herself off to the bedroom. Laura sat and drank her coffee. She felt a great pit opening up in her stomach. Ever since the end of the Dean's reign at Silas she had been afraid that it would eventually turn out to not be quite over, but as the months had gone by without dangerous mysteries the fear had begun to reside. Always the awkward sense had turned out to be nothing more than the proddings of memories or the itchings of regrets. 

Carmilla emerged from the bedroom after half an hour with two packed suitcases and ticket reservations on the next train out of the Gare du Nord bound for Aachen. Laura said little during the journey, and Carmilla did not press her, but she kept her hand always around Laura's. 

They had managed well, for the three terms spent here in Paris, and grown fully into a couple. Laura was absorbed in the journalism course at Paris-Sorbonne and with improving her French as far as possible. It was good enough for classes and conversation, but composing in it was still something she needed to work on. Carmilla scarcely needed another degree but had drifted into an unofficial involvement with the philosophy department. Life was full – of study, of culture, of peace and most of all, of each other.

It was good, it really was. But there was a little voice at the back of her head to remind Laura that if it was good for her, there had been dozens of others who died in making it possible. Her friends, Danny and JP. Sarah-Jane, who'd been the first. The kids at the newspaper. The Summers who'd been loyal to Danny. Everyone down in the pit who never came up again.

It had taken the unveiling of a memorial for her to realise just how many never got their own happy endings, or their own soft epilogues. And if that was the price, hadn't it been too high?

* * *

Everything had happened very fast, Lola thought. She had texted Laura after managing to get a hold on herself following LaFontaine’s revelation. Before her tea had gone cold, the answer had arrived and the sense of foreboding was now shared by two more people. She had spent a tense morning with LaFontaine, finishing off the meringues, more to keep her mind occupied than anything else. And then at four o’clock a taxi had pulled up with Laura and Carmilla. Too fast, too efficient. Like they were all half-expecting it and knew what the next step was.

Lola had long stopped expecting anything and it had been years since she knew what the next step was.

Laura brought flowers, yellow chrysanthemums that looked very good on the mantelpiece. And now everyone was talking to her like she was an invalid. LaFontaine kept clutching at her hand. Laura enfolded her in a hug the moment she was through the door and then kept doing it while she explained the dreams and the cards. Even Carmilla had patted her on the back and called her ‘Perry’ rather than some derived nickname.

She knew why. They were all afraid that this might be the first sign of things not being over. Thye were afraid she might be getting lost in her own body and they were trying to stay in touch. They didn’t want to miss any clues. Like last time.

Lola resisted the fear as best she could. She did up two of the spare bedrooms as guest rooms. LaFontaine had one permanently on standby anyway, but she absorbed herself in the task of picking out bedclothes for Laura and Carmilla’s. Finally she ran out of things to do. She found her cards in the back of the kitchen cupboard where she had hidden them yesterday, and sat everyone down.

“So how long have you been doing this?” Laura asked. “The cards?”

“Um. I used to do it before Silas, and then also in my first year before - well.” Nobody asked her to fill in the 'well', and she was grateful for the small mercy. “But I started doing it again when I moved here. I don't know why really.” 

You shouldn't poke wounds to see if they're healing, but the temptation is so great.

“Do they work?” Carmilla reached out a hand to poke the top of the pack curiously. Something catlike about her still. 

“Of course they don't work,” LaFontaine said. “They're made of cardboard. Sorry Perr, I think it was just coincidence.”

That was just it, though. Blunt though LaFontaine was, the cards had never really worked beyond the slightly unsatisfactory level of picking out meaning in random events. “I don't think they did work, usually,” Lola said. “But then yesterday... it was creepy. And what about the dreams?”

“Those I'll give you,” LaFontaine agreed. “Not disputing the dreams, just the cards. We've seen meaningful dreams before, plus there are way more permutations there, and so less chance for coincidence.”

“Maybe they're... you know, warmed up?” suggested Laura. “Got used to you.”

“Maybe.” Or maybe there's something waking up inside me that knows how to use them properly, Lola thought. She didn't voice the concern, but she knew they were all thinking it. The fact that they weren't saying it made it worse.

She picked up the pack, shuffled it, and dealt five cards out face-down in a cross as before.

“The left is the past,” she said, tapping the blue and white backing. She flipped it over and all three guests craned their heads forward to see the Devil scowling on his throne with Adam and Eve chained at his feet. Laura let out a small involuntary gasp. “That's... violence. Force. Fate, sometimes. That's behind us. That sounds sensible, don't you think?”

There was a vague half-committed nodding from all concerned.

“The right is the future.” The card was Death. Lola looked around her friends' faces. Even LaFontaine seemed slightly queasy at the sight of a skeleton riding a white horse and so she added hurriedly, “It doesn't necessarily mean actual, literal death though.”

“But it might?” asked Carmilla. 

She nodded stiffly and moved on to the next. “The top is the ally.” The Hermit shuffled his way along, grey-clad and holding a lantern. The latter was in the form of a cage containing a star. She groped for the meaning. “Um... wisdom. Also concealment, someone who's hidden.”

Laura bit her lip. Lola would not meet LaFontaine's focused attention on her.

“The ally is someone who will help us,” she pointed out, to forestall any speculation. “The bottom is the adversary.” She turned over the inverted image of the Tower, struck by lightning and with two people tumbling down from its summit.

Carmilla picked it up and turned it both ways. “What does it mean if it's upside down?” she asked. “Does it have the opposite meaning?”

“Sometimes.” Lola plucked the card out of fingers and put it back where it belonged on the table, reversed so that the plunging figures were flying upwards from an inverted structure instead of plummeting to their deaths. “Or sometimes it's more subtle. It can mean the same thing but with a different emphasis – so the Tower usually stands for disaster. But reversed is still bad fortune, but in a more... you know, continuous sense. Oppression rather than sudden calamity.”

Her fingers hovered over the governor in the centre of the table. She closed her eyes and flipped it. There was a short silence.

“Okay Perr,” said LaFontaine, carefully. “Guess you're on to something.” They tapped the Hanged Man, once again performing his reversal of a reversal.

* * *

Lola dreamed.

She was in a dark place. There was a cold grey floor under her feet and cold grey walls to either side. Everywhere was the smell of dust. She was enclosed tightly. The corridor was narrow, with just enough room for one person to walk, gently brushing each wall with their shoulders. Some kind of vague light hovered around the place, but didn't seem to emanate from anywhere in particular.

There didn't seem to be a particular reason to choose one way rather than another so she picked her way at random. Behind her, there was soft stirring in the air as if others were following at a distance. The wall left a grey smudge on the black gown she wore. She rubbed her fingers against the surface. It was the finest of ash, dry and powdery. Under her feet was more of the same. The floor was stamped down, cinders pounded to a solid surface. She couldn't see the ceiling above her, but she knew it was there. 

The muffled sounds of her own footsteps on the packed ash floor seemed horribly loud and more than once she slowed momentarily to strain her ears towards the vague murmurings from far behind. For some reason she knew she could not turn now that she had started.

The corridor came out into a small square hall, with doorways – but no doors – leading off to each side, and also straight ahead. In the middle was a square platform, raised a few inches off the ground. She stepped around it even though it was bare and moved on ahead. The next stretch of corridor lasted for perhaps a minute before it, too, opened into a small square space much the same as the first. There was a platform in the centre as well, with a crisp and fraying patch of woollen cloth on. She ignored it.

Lola came to the fourth room before the bell sounded. The sound had a cracked, broken feel to it, the very opposite of a pleasing chime. She felt her skin creep and her hair stand on end. Behind her, the sussurus was that of children whispering behind her back from when she was young. She picked up pace. Gathering her black skirts in bunched fists, she started to hurry. 

The fifth room was not the same as the previous four. Instead of a bare doorway ahead, there were steps leading up. She strained her eyes to see where they were going, but they just faded into the omnipresent grey. She took them one at a time, keeping her right hand on the wall to steady her.

There was a landing part way up, and she emerged into it to change staircases. There were no doorways off to each side on the stairs, only straightforward ascent. Instead of side passages, the sixth room had a pair of alcoves. In each was set a statue of a female figure with wide eyes and imperious bearing. They weren't the same, but they looked close enough that they could be sisters – or perhaps just the same person differently presented.

She was halfway to the seventh room when the bell rang again. From far behind her was a churning and a faint, distant howling. It was a long way away, but there was no chance to turn off. She started to take the steps two at a time, nearly slipping on the unstable edges of the compounded cinders. She had barely entered the seventh room and registered that there were no more stairs but only a corridor ahead with something at one end when the bell rang for the third time. The howling was rising – she could hear it coming up the stairs behind her and she ran.

Running was difficult in the hallway with the walls so close but she went as fast as she could. The thing at the end was a glimmer, and then it was a gap, a space of light. Lola knew, somehow, that if she could make it the thing behind would not follow. There was rushing behind her, and the whispering voices rose and rose in pitch. Air stirred her ankles and she didn't know whether it was the flapping of her skirts or the wake thrown up by something approaching.

There was a girl at the end of the passageway, staring in terror through a large window. She had pale skin and reddish-gold hair. Lola picked up her pace as she approached the window. There was a step just below and she leapt up onto it. As she cast herself through the window and into safety, she saw with shock that the screaming face before her was her own.

She woke up in her own bed with the sound of breaking glass in her ears. Heart hammering, she flung herself out of the covers and into the corridor. The corridor outside was that of her own familiar house, soft rug underfoot and landscape watercolours on the walls. The streetlamp outside cast an orange patch of light here and there. All was still and undamaged.

“Perr?” LaFontaine opened their own door, throwing bright light from their room out onto the landing. “Are you okay?”

Lola looked around, eyes wide. At the far end of the corridor, at the opposite end from where the stairs landed, was a full-length mirror. She had put it there to enhance the space, to give the illusion of the passage being longer than it was. She stared into it from a distance, willing it to be the same place shown in the glass as here under her feet.

“There's someone there,” she said and passed her hand in front of her face. LaFontaine stood next to her and squeezed her shoulder.

“That's us, Perr. Did you have a nightmare?”

“No! I mean, yes nightmare. But that's not us.” And as the two of them watched the dark smudge that should have been their own reflections flapped and wavered as if cloth were being thrown around in the wind. Something moved up from the depths.

“What the creeping hell is going on?” Carmilla's voice sounded from behind her, but Lola did not turn. She padded slowly towards the mirror. As she drew closer the smudged darkness gained form. She was coming, thrown up from the darkness of the reflection. The walls within the mirror were grey and cold, framing the fleeing figure in a prison. Panic flowed through her, but she couldn't run away.

LaFontaine tried to grab her hand, but she was pulled to the mirror as if hypnotised. The running figure was almost as large as her now. Lola put out a hand to touch the cold glass. She wondered whether she should break it and whether that would free or destroy the fugitive. The figure reached the other side of the barrier and mounted the sill behind the frame.

Breaking through, shattering the glass into a thousand tiny fragments, death and darkness streaming off her limbs, Matska Belmonde stepped down from the mirror.


	3. The Other Side of the Mirror

Nobody seemed to know what else to do, so Laura made hot chocolate. Carmilla had taken the shaking and disoriented Mattie off to the living room while LaFontaine dabbed at Perry's scratches here in the kitchen. A tint of blue was beginning to seep through the gap in the curtains, but it was still far too early.

Laura tried to catch Perry’s eye and look meaningfully sympathetic. “Anything we need to say now, before we go through?” she asked.

“Why in hell’s name are you not dead, Belmonde?” LaFontaine suggested.

“Why my _house_?” said Perry. She didn’t look at the other two and it wasn’t clear whether she was addressing either of them or talking herself. “Why _mine_? Can’t I have my own house to myself without some-” She broke off and Laura patted her on the shoulder. Nobody said anything more until wisps of steam started coming off the pan. 

“Let’s go through, shall we?” Laura distributed the filled mugs, letting LaFontaine take one to Mattie so that she could carry Carmilla’s.

Mattie was wrapped firstly in the grey shroud she'd been wearing when she came out of the mirror and over that a pile of blankets pulled hurridly out of their various bedrooms. She took her mug in icy hands without looking up. Her hair was filthy and dusted with ash. Laura waited for Perry to fuss with a cushion cover to keep the mess contained, but it didn't happen.

“So,” she said. Everybody looked at Laura, waiting for her to begin. It was after all her accustomed role to ask the questions. At the moment a general scream of bafflement sounded most appropriate, but she tried to phrase it nonetheless. “Ms Belmonde. Matska. Mattie. What the _what_?”

Mattie shook her head. She looked different – in her manner, and her way of holding herself. There was a slump in her shoulders, dark circles around her eyes. Her lips were dry and cracked and she wasn't smiling. 

“I don't know,” she said eventually.

“You don't know?” Laura tried to keep the disbelief out of her voice. “No idea at all?

“Nothing. I was down by the Seventh Gate – giving Mircalla her easy riddle, as per instructions – and then I faded back into darkness. I'd earned my rest.” She closed her eyes. “A long, dark rest.”

“And then what? You were just here? In a mirror?”

“That's right. There must have been something beforehand... the primordial abyss without form. I think. It's hard to remember, it wasn't in time. It all runs away. The next thing I knew clearly was coming through the mirror.” She held up her arms and let the shroud slip back to show the network of fresh cuts, doubles of those on Perry's arms. “What did you _do_ , Kitty?”

“It wasn't us, Mattie,” Carmilla said.

“I saw you running,” said Perry. She kept her eyes turned down to the carpet and would not look at Mattie. “I saw you running through a maze. That's why I came out of my room. Wasn't that you? Don't you remember?”

“I don't _know_.” There was a petulant touch of Mattie's old intonation there, surfacing through the tiredness. “It all got... blurry.”

Perry wrung her hands together. It didn't look like she believed Mattie. “How can you not remember?”

Carmilla stirred. “Forgetfulness coming back from the underworld is a common trope in myths. Maybe it's true. I know I didn't forget anything coming back, but then that was a part of Mother's whole breaking open the jaws of death thing.”

Laura tried to think of the next sensible question.

“Um. Are you still a vampire? I mean with the Dean gone and-” Mattie opened her mouth. “Right, still a vampire. A corporeal one or a possessed by an ancient death goddess one? I can't believe these are standard questions now,” she added.

“I'm me. Here and now.” She pinched her arm and rubbed at the cuts again. “Nobody else in here as far as I can tell. Ereshkigal had other engagements, presumably.”

“And we're supposed to take your word for it?” Perry looked up finally, and there was a coldness in her voice. “It's awfully convenient, this amnesia.” 

Mattie met her eyes and stared back until Perry looked away and tucked herself defensively against LaFontaine's shoulder.

Laura threw up her hands. “So that's just... no clues. Come on!”

“Why here?” LaFontaine was frowning. “Why here? You died at Silas. Is there something nearby? Another hellgate? Was it Carmilla's presence?”

Mattie shrugged. She looked to her sister for help. 

“I didn't feel anything,” Carmilla said. “It was Betty Crocker had the creepy dream.”

“Well I don't know anything!” protested Perry. “You just came barging in. Like always,” she muttered. It was a mark of Mattie's exhaustion and disorientation that she didn't even have a comeback. She was swaying a bit.

Laura felt it best to draw matters to a close. “Okay,” she said. “I think we need to get this in order. Carm, take Mattie to bed. Find a bed. Everyone else get some rest, get some supplies, get some headspace. We have a new investigation!” She put her hands on her hips and tried to look authoritative, which would have been easier without the cartoon owl on her pajamas.

“Ah, the voice of authority,” Mattie sighed. She managed a weak smile and a half-hearted pout. “And there was I thinking I might want to enjoy the land of the living on my own terms. Well, business before pleasure. Although I do hope you'll give a poor underworld escapee some time off to L'Ambrosie soon - my mouth tastes like I've been eating asphodel for a year.” She put on wide eyes, which was hardly necessary in the circumstances.

Carmilla touched her arm. “We're in Aachen, Mattie.”

“Really? Why not Paris, sis?”

“This isn't my place. Raggedy Anne here's your host.” She indicated Perry, still curled up against LaFontaine's side.

“Ah. Didn't think it was your taste in décor, Kitty. But how charming, Lola. I'd have brought a bottle had I known.”

* * *

Lola usually liked having a house full of guests but today had less the mood of hosting a party and more a feeling of manning the headquarters for an expedition. LaFontaine had gone back to their laboratory to gather up their collection of books borrowed semi-permanently from the Silas library. Laura and Carmilla had spent the morning gathering supplies in town. They'd come back with food for everyone, a small office worth of stationery, new clothes for Matska - and of course a supply of blood as well. Carmilla still had her list of friendly or bribable blood bank clerks, so the necks of Aachen's citizens were safe for the moment.

The afternoon sun outside was bright and welcoming, but everyone who could nap was inside and in bed so as to make up for the fractured night before. Presumably there was sleeping going on in Laura and Carmilla's room, anyway. You never could tell with those two and Lola didn’t want to go in and find out. 

Matska had lain down on a bare mattress straight after the meeting ten hours ago and fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the horizontal. Her stretched-out body still in the grey robes gave her the look of a corpse laid out for burial. She hadn't been heard stirring since.

Lola herself couldn’t sleep despite the grogginess in her head. Instead she had given the landing a proper tidy up, running a piece of putty through the grain of the carpet to pick up even the smallest fragments of glass. Then she washed the carpet, not least to remove the putty stains. Nothing short of a knife to her throat would have persuaded her to enter Matska’s room, but she dutifully stacked fresh bedclothes and a few provisions outside the door.

Her kitchen was her place of order and retreat in these trying circumstances. Chop and order and wash and dry – everything moving in a smooth cycle from cupboard to oven to sink and back to cupboard again.

There was a rustling from the door. “Good afternoon, Lola.”

Lola froze. She tried to focus on the mushrooms on her chopping board and not turn round. Matska Belmonde was behind her and there were dozens of conversations she did not want to have with the woman.

“Good afternoon, Ms Belmonde. Did you sleep well?” she asked, precisely formal. Sticking to formula seemed the best option.

“I would say I'd slept like the dead,” Matska purred, “but that might be considered to be in bad taste at the moment. However. We have something more important to discuss, darling.” There was pacing back and forward out the corners of Lola's vision. “Do please turn around so I can look you in the eyes.” 

Lola obeyed, hesitantly, eyes lowered. Suddenly Matska took hold of her chin and pulled her head up.

“Look at me. Now.” She swiveled Lola’s head from one side to the other, peering into her eyes. “Hmm. Once upon a time, Susie Homemaker, we had a problem. You might remember. They sent you messages. They sent you dreams. And we both know what happened next – so I think you know where I'm going with this.” Her hands were strong and for someone without actual bloodflow, surprisingly warm.

Lola felt the blood draining out of her cheeks. “Get off me,” she hissed, and struggled - more for the look of the thing than for any hope of escaping. There were knives in the rack, but a long way out of reach. And wasn't that just the kind of action that would have Belmonde disembowling her if she tried?

Matska ignored Lola's darting glances. “Patience. I’m trying to think. Like I said, the last time we met all of a sudden there was somebody else behind these adorable grey eyes. And that didn’t end pleasantly for me, Miss Prim-and-Proper.” She tilted Lola’s head back and forth as if she were trying to detect a smudge on a glass.

“She’s gone. You were there.”

“Yes. I know. But I also know I was gone – and here I am again. So I feel like making sure.” She finished her inspection of Lola’s irises and released her. “To be entirely honest, I don’t know quite what I’m looking for anyway. But you do seem to be indistinguishable from standard issue frightened livestock, so that’ll do for now.” 

She stepped back and beamed. Instantly her attitude was different. The fangs retracted and the snarl evaporated. The vampire was replaced by a beaming society lady inspecting her fingernails.

Lola rubbed her chin. “What gives you the right?” It came out in a furious hiss, the anger bubbling inside her carrying her words forward so that she forgot she was speaking to somebody who could snap her like a twig. “You invade my house, you attack me in my own kitchen-“

“Yes, yes.” Matska waved the attack away as if it were of no consequence. “But once you've untwisted your little underthings – dear Lola – you will understand that I'm not keen on taking chances. And frankly, if you haven't lost your mind entirely you surely aren't keen on that either. So how about we stop being shocked about invasions of personal space and start being grateful that somebody is excessively keen that you remain simple, boring Lola Perry. Hmm?”

She nodded sharply at Lola's flushed face and drifted to inspect the kitchen and its windows overlooking the garden. “Are those _Félicité Perpétue_ by the wall?” she asked, turning back to smile through Lola's glowering. “I have a courtyard of Damasks at home in Rabat.”

Lola scrunched her toes together in the vain hope of disippating her anger. “Are we doing this? You attack me in my kitchen and now you want to talk about gardening?”

“Lola, you have got to stop taking this kind of thing to heart.” Mattie ticked her off indulgently. “You of all people should know how fluid the world can be. The essence of good business is in adapting to the changing situation.”

“And I’m meant to feel safe about this how?”

“You’re not!” She caught Lola’s expression and took pity on her. “Oh darling, if you can’t enjoy being unsure whether you’re going to live or die, you’re not going to have a very fun life.” She flashed her gleaming smile and sashayed out, leaving Lola to sag down and sit on the floor breathing heavily.

Of all the people who could have come up from the Underworld, Matska Belmonde was pretty much at the bottom of her preferences.

* * *

From the floor below came the sound of Perry clinking things around in the kitchen. Some of the clattering was a touch violent, but neither Laura nor Carmilla had any inclination to move from their nest of limbs to go and see what was winding her up.

“Hey, Laura? Are you all right at the moment? After yesterday morning I was worried.” Carmilla was stroking her shoulder in tight circles. “You hardly talked on the train up.”

Laura nudged Carmilla's cheek with her nose. “Yeah, don't worry. I’m fine. It was just – you know, a bad dream, and then I was all headachy and then the whole Perry knowing what I was dreaming thing shook me up a bit.” She nodded, hoping that the matter was settled. “But I'm okay now.”

Carmilla made a face. “Yeah, that was definitely a bit of a freaky breakfast.” She continued to look expectantly at her girlfriend. From outside drifted birdsong and sunshine.

“Carm, I’m okay.” Laura said with insistence. “Your concern is, as ever, extremely cute and attractive. But it’s just some debris from the past. Stuff like last year, you'd have to be crazy not to have the odd nightmare, right?” She tried to look hearty and enduring.

“It wasn’t your fault, what happened,” Carmilla said quietly.

Laura shrugged, very deliberately. “Doesn’t really matter now, does it? It’s all done.” This sounded less than convincing. “And now we’ve got something new to investigate!” She perked her voice up, and let Carmilla understand that the subject was changed for now.

“And there was me thinking we were done with fruitless research for the decade.” She sighed. “Right. Investigation. You’re the journalist, Hollis: what’s the first step?”

Laura considered the options. “I suppose we do believe Mattie? That she’s not been sent back as some avatar of a capricious death goddess again?”

Carmilla tried to put her thoughts in order. “I believe she doesn't feel Ereshkigal inside her head anymore. That's probably the best we can do at the moment. And if she really can't remember – well, that is something associated with coming back from the dead. Remember last year, how strange she was? Like she knew everything. But she's not like that now.”

“Right. Weird possessed Death Goddess Mattie knew I used to copy Jenny Slater's homework - which even I'd forgotten about. Hang on, let me grab my notebook.” She drew a neat red line under the last scribblings and put the date down. “Thursday 23rd June. Right. _Mattie alive. Not inhabited by Death Goddess. At the moment. Probably_ ,” she added conscientiously in brackets.

“But how about Red and Curly? She's just manifested the ability to detect Mattie's return via her dreams.” Carmilla gestured. “You know what I'm suggesting. Mother?”

Laura shook her head. “The Dean's gone. Like, literally gone. She had the missing bits of her that were in the talismans stuck back on and became Inanna again. We were there, remember?”

“All right.” Carmilla sounded less than convinced, but significant looks at Laura's pen provoked no new notes. “But on the subject of creepy dreams...”

 _Creepy dreams. Question asked: Who is this who is coming_? Laura tapped her teeth with her pen. “And we know that now. It was Mattie, right?”

“Maybe. It’d be a short mystery if that’s the case. Badly plotted.”

“Not everything has to be an epic slow-burn, Carm. It might be a one-shot!”

“What?” asked Carmilla, nonplussed at the vocabulary.

“I will get around to showing you fanfiction one day. But anyway. Why might it not refer to Mattie?”

“Too many people, I think,” Carmilla said slowly, trying to draw out her suspicion. “I mean: why would we all dream about the same question if it were just a matter of Mattie coming back? What connects each of us to Mattie?”

“No, you’re right!” Laura said, jotting this down. “Like, LaFontaine and Mattie have scarcely ever spoken! If the creepy dreams were just a premonition of last night-“

“-and she didn’t actually appear herself in any of the dreams, remember,” added Carmilla.

“-then they’re separate events. Well, maybe she was in Perry’s first one. Perry couldn’t tell who was chasing her.”

“Okay, true.”

“And then we've got the cards. Scary Hanged Man turning up all halo-y. I'm suprised Perry kept them, though. I thought she threw all the dangly earrings and interesting floaty clothes in the bin after the Tythia thing.”

“People hang on to things sometimes. Just one or two reminders.” Carmilla fiddled with her necklace, which was new and was not the anchor she had worn between 1872 and 2014. “Lucky for us in this case.”

“Do you really think they work? I know it's creepy that the hanged person keeps turning up, but... they're made of cardboard. We're not talking ancient mystical spells involving bloodstones here, we're talking pieces of coloured paper you can buy on the high street.”

“I don't know. Mother used to do all sorts of things that shouldn't have worked.” Carmilla waved into space with her free hand as the other continued to stroke up and down Laura's shoulder. “Entrails, the cracks in turtle shells, putting snakes in piles of ashes. Cards aren't so much of a step.”

“I suppose not.” She tapped the point of her pen against the page, making a cluster of little dots. She had run out of inspiration for now, but it was a start. “Well look at us. Laura and Carmilla, supernatural investigators once more.” She beamed up at Carmilla.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Eyebrows and skepticism on full blast.

“Maybe. I think it might be fun. Nobody's dead or missing this time, after all. Even the opposite! And I seem to remember we had a good line in desperate kissing and lusty sexual undertones last time...” Her fingers walked their way up Carmilla's thigh. “Remember?”

“Oh, I see. Well, I don't think we'll be doing the lusty sexual undertones this time.” Carmilla's hand migrated from Laura's shoulder to her exposed collarbone, and then slipped downwards. “I'm much more into overtones these days.”

* * *

There was a single wineglass standing on the work surface, next to the dirty pans. It was mostly empty, but there was about a mouthful of blood still in it. Lola left it till last and did the conventional part of the washing up first. Halfway through, it occurred to her to check the fridge. As she had expected, Carmilla had put the bloodbags on the top shelf, which had been largely unoccupied. Lola moved them to the bottom shelf, the proper place for raw meat and associated items, and wiped down their previous position.

The door to the garden was open and a warm evening breeze wafted in.

“There’s no sense in lurking around outside,” she said, not looking up. “You might as well come in.”

“You are on the mark, Raggedy Anne.” Matska slipped in. She had changed out of her shroud into one of the new outfits chosen by Carmilla, and was holding what Lola recognised as one of her own white roses. She hadn't asked permission.

“Would you like to finish your blood?” she asked, trying to pretend this was a completely normal thing to ask.

Matska shook her head. “One mustn't have too much too soon after a fast,” she said. “It goes to your head.”

Lola picked the glass up by its stem. There had been a lot of blood in her life over the last couple of years. For a moment she had the unaccountable impulse to take a sip just to see the look on Matska’s face, but that would probably not be a good way of demonstrating her complete non-suspicious normality. Instead she swirled it round, watching it stain the glass, before tossing it down the drain. She submerged the empty glass in the washing water.

Matska was watching her with something approaching amusement. Again the urge to say or do something that would wipe that smug expression clean arose.

“By the way, did you meet your brother in the underworld?” Lola asked.

“Darling, I avoided the little toad even when alive. It would take more than the endless boredom of the dead for me to seek out Sweet William’s company. And you know perfectly well I remember nothing. So why? You weren’t one of his brainless conquests, were you?” She looked mildly appalled by the prospect.

Lola twisted out half a smile. “Not my type. But he is the only person I’ve ever killed, so I was hoping for an update.”

Matska was momentarily at a loss, but the smile came back quickly after its fractional absence. “Are you trying to impress me, Lola?”

She had been, Lola supposed. Although it was more that she wanted recognition - as an actor, something other than part of the background. Opposition was better than victimhood.

“Because if you wanted to be a killer,” Matska drew closer, “You only have to draw on your sleepwalking experience. All those kids at the newspaper - which I seem to recall you accused me of eviscerating…”

Lola took a deep breath, and then a second one. She was practiced at this by now. “We all know that wasn’t me,” she said. “I am not responsible for what the Dean did.” 

Everyone had been very kind about it, even Mel.

“Good. I'm glad to see you know that.”

She had said it with emphasis and it took Lola a second to work out why. “Because if it ever gets to the point I can't distinguish between me and her you'll snap my neck, I imagine?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Lola stared. She had known that answer before it was given, but still hadn't expected it so bluntly. It was – well, menacing and terrifying, but also surprisingly refreshing. Better than being an invalid everyone tried not to prod too hard, which was the way everybody else was treating her.

“Well, so long as we're clear,” she managed to say, and went on with the washing up. Matska did not leave, but continued instead to drift around the kitchen, inspecting the three small pictures of places in Frankfurt which Lola had put up to remind her of home. There was an itching at the back of Lola's scalp in the direction of the woman, and it grew and grew until finally Matska snapped off an ivy leaf protruding through the door and she had had enough.

“Did I miss the reason that you're still here?” Lola snapped. “Look, fine. It's good to know you're very much on the look-out for supernatural attacks. But that doesn't mean you need to be hanging around. You're perfectly fine to stay out of my way, all right?” She threw down her sponge and stamped into the living room.

Inevitably, the door swung open again as soon as she'd sat down.

“You've got a bit of poise back, sis,” Carmilla said. She leaned back against the cushion and allowed her chin to be tapped as Matska came in.

“A good day's sleep, three bags of blood and this, hmm, moderately chic new wardrobe,” said Matska. She flourished her sleeve. “What more could a vampire want? Pleased to see you know how to make use of your inheritance.”

“I did my best. I know it's not Paris, but better than that shroud.”

“Grey so wasn't my colour. Don't you agree, gidget?” She beamed at Laura, and it was the old wide terrifying smile.

Laura's expression wavered before she made up her mind to play along. “Wouldn't go with your taste in lipstick,” she said, and got a flick on the nose for being a good sport. 

“And Lola. What would you say?” She performed a half-twirl. 

Lola wished she could fold herself even further into a ball and not have to deal with any more conversation with Matska Belmonde. But she knew where that kind of reply would lead.

“Very nice,” she said sourly. “If you like the whole 'business in the front, killer in the back' look.”  
Matska was trying not to laugh.

“Well, anyway,” Lola added. “Since we're all here and all-” she bit her lip, “recovered our former characters, I thought we could have a drink. LaFontaine, there's some wine in the fridge.”

“Cheers,” Laura offered when it had been distributed. “Happy... incomprehensible mystery.”

“Welcome back Mattie,” suggested Carmilla.

“To fruitful research,” LaFontaine proposed.

“The Queen of Wands,” Lola said softly, looking at the reflections of light off the wine.

Matska propped herself up against the mantelpiece and raised her glass in precise fingers. “It's good to be back,” she said. “To life and death.”


	4. A Conference of Paper

The house slept, or tried to.

Snoring through the three helpings at dinner, LaFontaine suspended themselves in the centre of an armillary sphere and regretted that they couldn’t see every direction at once. Somewhere in this place was the view from nowhere, the vantage point from which to gather the endless complexity of the world together, but they couldn't find it. 

Matska Belmonde sat awake in a cane chair by the window, imagining herself at home in Morocco where she could welcome the brown-necked crows that would throng her balcony in the morning light. The crows here in Germany were all abed, but her sharp senses could pick up the flitting of bats above the park across the road.

Lola Perry steadfastly refused to think about the Underworld, or Inanna, or Matska Belmonde. Instead she sank into the covers and focused on remembering hiding behind the bike sheds at school and shyly allowing Martina to kiss her. It hadn't been a great success, but she clung to the memory of slightly chapped lips with determination.

Carmilla shifted uneasily, one hand round Laura’s bare waist and the other clutching feverishly at an empty shell of a girl babbling about the light. She couldn't remember the girl's name. Joanne, or Emily, or Mina, or Lucy – they all ended the same. It didn't much matter.

Laura surveyed a vast table laden with fruit. It glowed in the grey surroundings - red and green apples, glistening dates, great bunches of grapes, and best of all a brass bowl full of burnished pomegranates. She picked up a small knife and set to work.

The pomegranate seeds were like blood shining in the depths of the cut she made. The more she cut the more she had to eat. The seeds burst in her mouth, sweet and fragrant. She was greedy and gutted the fruits one by one until her hands and lips were stained red and the juice spattered her front. It was a long time before she had eaten enough.

Eventually she turned to go but found no way out. Belatedly she remembered that this was how it worked in fairy tales: when you eat the food you cannot leave because you are now in debt to your hosts. She tried to spit out the seeds she’d swallowed but there were too many and anyway the evidence was all over her. The bowl on the table was empty and accused her of its emptiness. 

It hurt to pull out her heart from her chest, but once she’d peeled back her skin and snapped off a few ribs it was easier than she’d thought. She put it in the bowl still dripping blood and hoped that would be enough. It looked very small there to be taking the place of all the pomegranates.

She woke with a start. It was dark. This was the worst part when she had bad dreams.

“Carm?” she whispered. There was an incoherent mumbling behind her in reply. “Are you awake?”

“Nghbluh.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Mwah?”

“You know, I could really do with some comforting words rather than pillow eating right now.” Her girlfriend’s inability to be woken up by anything less than a bucket of water - or an actual flailing attack as a couple of nights ago - was familiar to Laura but still not convenient. She shifted along carefully, putting Carmilla's hand down gently on her vacated spot, and slid out of bed. She let the door rest half-shut and went down to the kitchen.

“So you have a midnight cookie habit now.” said Mattie from the door when she was on her third. Laura jumped, and nearly choked. She buried her suprise under a swallow of milk.

“When I couldn't sleep when I was young, my dad gave me milk and cream crackers,” she said. “Now I'm twenty-one, I think I'm allowed to graduate to milk and chocolate chip cookies.”

Mattie insinuated herself through the kitchen and purloined one for herself. “Shouldn't you be keeping your Carm warm?”

Laura shrugged. “She once slept through me falling out of bed and dragging the alarm clock with me. I'll go back in a bit. On that subject, shouldn't you be sleeping the sleep of the recently undead?”

“I slept nearly all day.”

There was a silence of a minute or so before nervousness got the better of Laura.

“So this is really awkward,” she commented to the kitchen at large. “Going for a midnight feast and finding your girlfriend's recently resurrected vampire sister who you may have slightly caused the death of patrolling the hallways.”

Mattie was doing her impenetrable satisfied smile face. “You get to my age and you stop taking killing personally. Besides, darling - Mother played us all. Even those of us with the centuries of life experience to see it coming. Kitty was right about that.” She stole another cookie. “How's the strapping gingersnap these days?”

“Dead.”

“Ah.”

“You didn't know?”

“Being Ereshkigal's handmaiden was a temporary measure. She's not on tap any longer, so all that fascinating knowledge of the dead has passed away. I only know the things that are mine, and what I remember her saying when she inhabited me.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Jenny Slater's homework, for instance. Who was Jenny Slater?”

“She had blonde hair and really didn't know as much about the Russian Revolution as her very long essay suggested.”

Mattie laughed gently.

“When you were – you know, all incorporeally possessed, you said something to Carm. About the Underworld being the long echo of your regrets, and that Carm's were down there waiting for her.”

“You're cheery this morning.”

“Is it true?”

“Yes. At first, at least. I was allowed my rest after what happened in the pit. Well, I think I was. All behing the veil of the Lethe at the moment. But I remember the first stage, and yes: it was a long, long time to hear all of that.” She flicked a crumb into her mouth and stood up. “But you don't want to know. Go back to your living girlfriend and get some sleep. After all, you're leading the enquiry tomorrow, Lois Lane.”

* * *

LaFontaine dropped a heavy sheaf of paper on the table with a thud and threw themself into a chair. Lola winced at their disregard for the furniture and they made an apologetic face.

“What's this?” Carmilla lifted up the first leaf only to find that it wasn't made of separate sheets but was actually a huge concertina strung together by transparent tape.

“This is the most comprehensive correlation chart of tarot card meanings I could come up with. Rider-Waite, Marseilles, Tarocchi, Thoth. Even the flowery New Age stuff where everyone's a mother goddess whether they like it or not. I dredged the internet.” LaFontaine put their head in their hands. “There are like a thousand schemes of interpretation. Not to mention all the variants. Did you know the Rider-Waite deck just switched the numberings of Strength and Justice to make things more symmetrical?”

“No...”

“Neither did I. And I don't think I wanted to. How can you have a divinatory system that doesn't have consistent meanings? The more evidence you assemble, the less clear it gets.” They thumped the paper pile. “Anyway, that was my morning. How did you guys do?”

Carmilla picked up _The Interpretation of Dreams_ stuck full of fluorescent tabs. “We've developed a schism. Laura and I,” here she jogged her girlfriend in the next chair, “have opted for the Freudian interpretation. Susie Homemaker is holding out for a Jungian approach.”

“I just refuse to believe literally everything's about sex,” Lola said. “It's undignified.” 

“Speak for yourself, Lola.” This was Matska, reclining on one of the sofas and applying herself to LaFontaine's collection of Silas library books. Lola bunched her fists, and then tried to hide the fists behind her so that she wouldn't see them.

LaFontaine narrowed their eyes at Matska and pulled Lola's cards towards them. “Hey Perr. How would you go about sorting out what readings to use? Can we calibrate somehow?”

Lola was grateful for the distraction and came to sit down, facing away from Ms Belmonde's giant gleaming lipsticky grin . She leafed through the cards and tried to think. After a moment she placed the pack face down in the middle of the table. 

“I think,” she said, “that there's not much point asking the same question again and again. It's a sign of madness. I'll give you one each. See if it speaks to you. After all, we know what each other are like.” She dealt the first to herself, ignoring the thought that a card speaking to her would have been exactly the kind of thing the teenage Lola would have liked, and showed it around. Number Seven, The Chariot. “Ideas?”

“You're going to get a car?” Carmilla suggested. Laura swatted her.

“War?” LaFontaine said. “Got to admit, that doesn't sound a lot like you, Perr.”

“Um. Speed,” said Laura. “Maybe something is going to happen quickly?”

Matska sauntered over and plucked it out of Lola's hand. “Pulled by black and white Sphinxes. Riddles, maybe?” She pursed her lips and tapped the face of the figure in the chariot. “The rider has an eight-pointed star on her forehead.”

“ _His_ forehead,” said Lola, but in truth the figure in the car – star on their forehead, wand in their right hand - could be either depending on how you squinted. She was surprised that Matska had offered such a pertinent suggestion rather than resorting to her normal sarcasm, but she could surely have done without having her attention drawn to the star.

“If you say so, Lola. Has nice wavy red hair anyway,” she smirked. 

Lola tried not to make the face she was feeling. “Fine. No help there. The normal meaning of the Chariot is conquest, especially of knowledge. But that doesn't really sound like me. Your turn then, Ms Belmonde. Since you're keen.”

It was Death, mounted and bearing a black flag with a white rose. She broke out into a broad smile. “How delightful! Perhaps there's something to this domestic witchery after all.” The room was silent. It seemed appropriate without any further explanation. Lola waited for Matska to place it back on the table herself before shuffling it into the pack.

“Me next!” Laura stood up in her seat and plucked hers off the stack. Justice, with a sword and scales. She held it up in front of everyone's faces in pride.

“She looks like you, cupcake.” And indeed the robed figure of Justice wore chin-length straight brown hair and looked perhaps a little too small for her great crown and voluminous robes.

This was a lot of Major Arcana to draw at once, Lola reflected. Twenty-two out of seventy-eight would suggest one in four to be typical. That had been a recurrent feature as well over the last couple of days: a lot of Major Arcana, a good few Swords, but less on the Wands, Cups and Pentacles. The statistics were mollified only slightly by Carmilla pulling out the Ace of Swords.

“Not bad,” she said, expressionless.

“Carm?” said Laura. “Please tell me you're not about to sulk because your card didn't have a fancy name.” Carmilla pinched her and she shrieked. 

“Great force, in love as well as in hatred,” Lola read out from her booklet that had come with the pack. LaFontaine tried to unfold their concertina of paper to cross-reference alternative interpretations.

“Guardianship?” they suggested.

Laura perked up, “Are we just ignoring the fact that wielding a massive sword is a thing that Carm has done?” 

“Like I said: too many meanings is our problem.” LaFontaine ostentatiously cracked their knuckles. They were at the far end of the table, and had to reach on their fingertips to get to the pack. They fumbled it, and two cards were flipped off the pack at once, landing face up on the table.

“Which was mine?” they asked.

“I think _that_ one was on top.” Lola handed them the Magician – card number one, with the attributes of all the four suits ranged around him and an infinity symbol above his head. LaFontaine nodded appreciatively. 

“Mastery over the elements,” they said. “Get in.”

The card without an owner was the Hierophant.

“Hierophant?” Laura asked.

“High Priest,” Carmilla translated. “So, Magician: how does your chart help us here?”

LaFontaine cleared a space on the floor and spread out the great mass of paper. Laura and Carmilla joined them on their knees to pour over it. 

“It's like pre-school again,” Matska observed. “Can we have colouring in next? Or maybe circle time if we're good?”

“And when were you last at pre-school, Ms Belmonde?”

Matska laughed. “You should really be calling me Mattie, Lola.”

“Everyone calls me Perry,” said Lola, without much force.

“Yes, Lola. I know they do.”

* * *

The brainstorming session was in full flow. Laura had arranged a corkboard and coloured paper. She addressed the seated ranks.

“Right, team.” She pointed to the blue square labelled _What happened to Mattie?_ It was next to two other squares: one red marked _What's up with the dreams?_ and one green reading _What does the Hanged Man mean?_

“Can I just say that, speaking in my capacity as a former consultant to a vast and well-equipped multinational occult resource conglomerate, this is laughable?” said Mattie. She had, Laura noticed, nonetheless accepted the handout of a personal notebook and written her name on it in capitals. Territorial to the last.

“Your comment is noted, Ms Belmonde,” Laura said. “But not very helpful. Also, we disabled three squads of Corvae goons and a special investigation unit using something my Dad made in his spare time - so I think we're holding our own.” Mattie delivered one of her pouts.

“So on the dream front,” said Carmilla, “we are mainly questioning the _who is this who is coming_ thing. Because it's damn weird, and the only thing we've got to go on is that three of us had them. Which means there has to be something you three have got in common. But we don't know what that is.”

“Right. And on the card front?”

Perry held up her hands in despair. “The more questions we ask, the more answers we get. Some stuff comes up again and again but the more I deal, the more there are. So that doesn't help.”

LaFontaine put in, “The Hanged Man in particular – everyone seems to disagree on what it means. Especially whether he's a traitor or a martyr. And Perry dealt him reversed, which just makes the whole thing a storm of mystical crap. The person who designed Perr's deck said that it was about death and resurrection which – well, that sounds kind of relevant. But he said that about every card. Like I say: mystical crap.”

“Okay,” Laura said in summary. “Things are getting bogged down. We need ideas. LaF, you're our resident radical idea conceiver. Please say you have something wild and dangerous that'll break us out of this deadlock.”

LaFontaine said, “So I’ve got one idea. But, um. You’re not going to like it,” they added, speaking to Perry.

She sighed. “Do I want to know why?”

“Because last time somebody tried it they broke open the fabric of the universe and the Queen of the Fairies returned.” Perry choked.

“And trying this again will help how?” Laura wanted to know.

“So according to those tapes in the Library – the ones of Perry during first year,” LaFontaine explained, and amid the turned faces Perry suddenly found the texture of the carpet very interesting and deserving of study, “according to them, she did a spell to ‘reverse that which would not be revealed.’ That's right, isn't it?” Perry nodded without looking up.

“And it nearly doomed us all and finally resulted in three months of cramps all at once,” said Carmilla. “Not really seeing the positives here.”

“Right, but it worked, didn’t it? It revealed what was hidden. Yeah, what was hidden was awful and terrible and almost ate the world, but it did what it said on the tin.” They squeezed Perry’s knee. “What did you do then that was different to all the other New Age-y stuff back then? I mean apart from doing it over a bloodwood statuette that was also a gateway to another dimension.”

“Right, apart from that.” Perry tried to think. “I’d been… you know, mucking around in the Library. Looking for books. Ones that looked mystical,” she added and dared them to laugh. Nobody did, although Matska seemed to be biting her lip. “And the spell I used was in one of those. It wasn't anything very complicated, but it did take a while.”

“Point of order, Miss Teacher,” Mattie said raising her hand languidly like she was in class. “I may be a little behind on all the gossip, and any odd things you found during your skulking around in the Library, but I was on the Board in 2012 and I do remember the state we found Mother in during the whole Fairy Queen thing.”

“Yes..?”

She turned to Perry. “Was that you? You, Miss Prim and Proper?” Perry nodded shamefaced, and Mattie whipped round to fix Carmilla in her eyes. “Mircalla Karnstein, you told us some passerby had done a spell and you got a student to reverse it. I spent three weeks trying to hunt the little moppet down in the arse end of Kazan following your clues - and now you're telling me it was Lola here?”

Carmilla shuffled in her seat. “I _may_ have told the Board a few lies. Like that the tapes were destroyed in the post-spell crashing around. And that a six-foot hiker with a Russian accent had been seen casting a spell by two helpful students and that I got one of them to reverse it. Look, if I'd told them the truth, Raggedy Anne and that arrow-fixated Summer would have met with a tragic accident at the Christmas Ball. I was sulking with Mother at the time, remember?”

“I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'Gee Mattie, it sure wasn't my intention to send you somewhere you'd ruin your favourite silk jacket falling into the Volga.'”

“You got a big green mark on your record,” Carmilla told Perry, with an apologetic glance at her sister. “That's probably why you got to be Floor Don rather than Potential Subversive Marked For Destruction.” 

“So what did you need?” Laura asked. “To do the spell?”

Perry tore her eyes off Carmilla and concentrated. “Salt. A mirror. Some oak leaves. I suppose,” she scratched her hands and then twitched and folded them in her lap. “I suppose I'd know how to do it again. As long as we don't think that... that thing is going to come back.”

“Should be fine,” Carmilla said with a shrug. “If you do it over something other than the statuette, it won't be the horrifying evil Fairy Queen again. Anything revealed should be a whole new horrifying evil instead.” Perry looked stricken, so she added quickly, “or it'll be moonbeams and joyous unity. One or the other.”

* * *

“Okay. We can do this.” Lola was muttering to herself more than to anyone else, and the others were good enough not to reply. “Okay.”

Matska Belmonde drummed her fingers on the patio. She sat cross-legged in the middle of a chalk circle with oak leaves and salt scattered underneath her. Her expression could have been many things, but it was certainly not impressed.

The stick cut off her pear tree wasn't much of a wand, but then the apparently-certified fully blessed rowan casting wand bought from a shop in Frankfurt hadn't been much of a wand either. Lola tried not to think about how ridiculous this all looked. At least she wasn't wearing baggy shiny purple... whatever you called those clothes, anyway. That would have caused Matska to be even more sarcastic than usual - which was not high up her list of things to enjoy.

Laura perched on a garden chair and watched wide-eyed. Carmilla leaned against the back of it and raised alternately one eyebrow and then the other. It was all very off-putting.

Lola closed her eyes and began to chant. It was one short sequence of syllables, repeated again and again. She had given up the last time after five repetitions when nothing visible happened.

“Ati me peta babka! Ati me peta babka! Ati me peta bab...”

“So this is kind of bizarre,” she heard Laura whisper behind her.

“Yeah.” Carmilla sounded concerned. She paused for one repetition. “You know, I think that spell might be a bit more wide-ranging than Betty Crocker thinks.”

“Anything going on there?” LaFontaine asked, peering at the circle's inhabitant as if into a specimen cage.

“Not a thing.” Matska stretched her arms. “Got anything else up your sleeve, Hocus Pocus?”

Lola stopped chanting and made a face. This was turning out to be exactly as embarassing as she had expected it to.

Matska stood up and scuffed the circle away. “All the same, you have a charming garden on a summer evening.” She curled her fingers round Lola's shoulder in a gesture that made her want to scream. “Not everyone can be magically talented as well as a good gardener.”

“Well, I'm sure it beats that dusty maze or wherever you were before here,” Carmilla said, linking arms with her sister.

“Oh God yes, that was dreadfully dull. All that ash underfoot.” She stopped, realising what she'd just said.

“Mattie? I thought you didn't remember?”

“I... I didn't. I _don't_ , I don't think.” Everybody stopped what they were doing to watch Matska touch a finger to her temple. “No, I don't – it's all unfocused.”

“So focus it, Belmonde.” LaFontaine snapped their fingers. “Memory's not a corkboard of handy facts in front of your eyes. It's like a library. Everything's on tap but all shelved away - you've got to ask it questions. Bring it up. Focus it.” They waved a hand vaguely. “What was the floor made of?”

“Ah- compacted ash. Hard, but it rubbed off.”

“Good. Air movement?”

“None.” She gazed through LaFontaine and let Carmilla slip off her arm without noticing. “It's there, I can feel it. The barrier's down. Keep asking.”

“Where were you going?”

“Up. Along corridors and then up staircases.”

“What was behind you?”

“Noise. Voices. Laughter. They were rising with me.”

“Rising? Where were you rising from?”

“The Great Below. The Great Below, so far down.”

“What were you rising to?”

“The Great Above.”

“Point to it.” Matska raised her hand and indicated the sky. “Who are you?”

“Matska Belmonde.” She focused on LaFontaine for a moment and cracked a smile. “Oh well, that's a relief. Did you think I might say something else?” 

Lola realised she was pulling a stray thread out of her blouse and shoved her hands into her pockets.

LaFontaine kicked the ground. “Come on, people don't just come back from the dead without a reason! What's the reason? Why did you come back?”

“It was the time. From the great below to the great above.”

“LaF-” said Carmilla urgently, but they had taken hold of Matska by the shoulders. The vampire seemed hardly to notice. She looked through their skull.

“You were running. Belmonde, who was behind you? Not the voices and the laughter. Behind them.”

Matska closed her eyes and swam in the memories pouring into consciousness. 

“The Queen of Bone and Ashes. She arises and I am lifted on her tide. The wake spreading before the bow. From the great below to the great above.”

She raised her hands to her head and held it as she brought her memory out of the dust. Everything Lola had seen in her dream and everything before which she hadn't. The words came chanting from Matska's mouth. “From the abyss she sets her mind on the heavens and the earth. From the great below Ereshkigal sets her mind on the great above. My mistress abandons the abyss, abandons the underworld, and ascends to the earth.”

There were no more questions after that. LaFontaine realised abruptly that they were aggressively shaking a thousand year-old vampire and jumped back. Carmilla clung to Matska's side as her sister snapped out of the reverie. Lola and Laura exchanged a wordless look.

“Well, I can think of exactly no ways in which that could possibly be a good thing,” said Carmilla.


	5. The Great Above and the Great Below

“Okay,” said Lola, making soothing motions with her hands. “I think we just need to calm down and de-escalate the situation. LaFontaine-”

“Perr, this is not a de-escalate kind of situation. Snarly vampire over there has found herself in the _Death Goddess_ way. So I’m just suggesting a precautionary containment using-”

“Listen Baby Einstein, if you don’t put down that shock collar I will rip you three ways from-”

“Not helping! LaF – less on the containment, please. We can-”

“Cupcake, maybe you want to not get between the crazy scientist and my out-for-blood sister-”

Lola lost track of the thread of the argument as it descended into mutual shouting. LaFontaine had unveiled the collection of weapons and containment devices which they just happened to have brought with them from their laboratory the other day. Just in case, they said. Matska was having none of it and had counter-proposed a bloodbath should anybody even try.

“Look.” Carmilla grabbed LaFontaine by the shoulder. “Nobody is putting anybody in a shock collar. Because that's the kind of thing maniac evil Deans with shackles in their freezers do.” LaFontaine managed to look shamed. She turned to her sister. “And nobody is going off on bloody rampages either. Because that's the kind of thing that kills the only people who might be able to help sort out this – whatever this is!”

LaFontaine shuffled their feet and dropped their collection of preventative equipment in a pile by the back door before stamping inside. Matska dusted herself off and stalked haughtily away without further words to anybody, leaving Lola to try and tidy up the mess of oak leaves, salt and her abandoned wand.

She found a large tub of frozen soup in the bottom of her freezer. Soup would be reassuringly normal in the circumstances. She sent Laura and Carmilla up with a tray to interrupt LaFontaine's sulking with company before realising that this left her with the unenviable job of finding Matska. There was of course the possibility of not giving her any soup at all, but that carried with it the threat of extreme pettiness if the snub were ever found out. Matska was after all the woman who, despite owning a bijou collection of mansions, would stubbornly fight with her sister over a cereal box. So Lola found a mug with painted roses on it.

Matska was in her own room, pacing in agitation between the door and the cane chair by the window. The room was bare, one of Lola's hardly needed extra chambers - an old iron bedstead that had been here when she bought the place, spare bedclothes, no decorations on the walls. Matska Belmonde was the only real thing in there. She looked daggers at Lola when she entered with a soft push of the door. Her fangs really were very prominent.

“I brought you some soup.” Lola hefted the mug as if it were her credentials and a shield combined.

“What?” she snarled.

“Soup. It’s oxtail,” Lola said, and held it out.

Matska's snarl receded a touch. She took the mug cautiously. “What for?”

“I was making some. For everyone, you know,” she added quickly, in case Ms Belmonde thought she was getting special favours.

“Thought you were trying to stay out of my way, Betty Crocker.” She was measured. Her precisely outlined eyes watched Lola flush and stare at her feet.

“I was,” she muttered, “I am. But I was making soup. So here’s yours.” She felt annoyed, whether at herself or at Matska she couldn’t tell, for turning this into an unnecessary ordeal.

“Well. Thank you.”

“You’re in my house,” she said, feeling somehow that an explanation was still being demanded. “So you get soup.”

“So I see.” Matska took a sip. “How’s your little friend with the shock collar obsession?”

“Ranting and raving to Laura, I expect.” Lola wavered on the threshold, but curiosity overcame her. “How’s your head now?”

Matska made a face. “In terms of pain I've had worse. In terms of discovering that the truly – and I cannot stress this enough – _terrifying_ death goddess is on her way up here and I'm the equivalent of a refugee running before an oncoming army: well, that's a bit different, as you might imagine.”

“Never thought I'd hear you describe anyone but yourself as terrifying,” Lola said. It was oddly discomforting to hear her talking like this. Matska was meant to be the terrifying one. There was at least something reliable about that, if not exactly reassuring.

“I suppose when you're a brief little human with a, hmm, white lace Alice band the different is a bit moot,” she said, curling the words out with a flash of relish. “But there are levels and levels.”

“End of the world territory?”

“Precisely.” She grimaced. “And I _like_ the world. It's full of beautiful places to see and interesting people to eat. Much nicer than down there in the dust and ashes. But to Ereshkigal and her family, it's just one option among many.”

Full of interesting people to eat. That was one thing to not ask for clarification on. “How… life-affirming of you,” she said instead.

“One way of putting it, darling.” She bit her lip in thought, and it dawned on Lola that this was a Matska Belmonde she had only seen before on film, telling her sister about the emptiness of the Great Below. 

Lola stayed standing there for a moment before nothing more could be said and she turned to leave.

“And Lola? For the last time: it’s Mattie. The whole fun of being an ancient bloodthirsty vampire is that you don’t have to bother with formality to impress people.” She hoisted the mug in a sort of toast and Lola left, feeling somehow that she’d been handed a riddle to solve.

* * *

Laura found Carmilla the next morning in one of the attic rooms with a view of the street. It was an empty place, with cardboard boxes of spare crockery and the less interesting kind of paperwork, but it also contained a big pendulum clock, something Perry had inherited from a grandparent. She kept it wound because that was what you were supposed to do with clocks, and the fact that this one was technically in storage did not dissuade her. Carmilla came here to read sometimes in the soothing company of the ticking. The book was open on her knees to a poem. Laura slipped down behind her, tucked her chin over her shoulder, and read aloud. 

“ _Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter_ ,” she said. “Um, so that's… 'But, friend, we are coming too soon-”

“Too late,” Carmilla corrected her. She took Laura's hand and guided her finger along the lines, translating as she went.

_“But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,_  
_Over our heads they live, up in a different world._  
_Endlessly they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us,_  
_Little they seem to care whether we live or do not._  
_For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them,_  
_Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods.”_

“Sounds cheery.”

“I just wanted to think a bit.”

It was one of those times, then. Laura recognised the tone and the symptoms.

It was a part of their relationship she hadn't truly been prepared for. After climbing out of the pit and their emergence into the light there had been the weeks of trying to make sense of it all, and she'd known that would be difficult. There had been nightmares and jumping at shadows for the both of them. But it was fine, because they'd had each other and you needed to go through that kind of thing before getting back on your feet, right?

What she had not been prepared for was that it would never truly stop. They'd moved on after a few weeks at her father's, gone to Paris and embarked on a new life. They bought an apartment and discovered favourite cafés and particular places to kiss unseen. But once a fortnight, or once a month, whether for the duration of a day or just for five minutes, they were back at the bottom of the pit and clinging to each other. It passed. 

Eventually she understood that it would never stop coming back, even if only for the briefest time. Like a path winding its way through a summer park, soaked in sunlight but always with the irruptions of shadows cast across it from things behind them.

“All right, Carm. What's up?”

“It's not fear,” Carmilla said, a little too fast. Laura hadn't been about to suggest it was, but she let her girlfriend talk. 

“What, then?”

“Paralysis. I've got a lot to regret.” Three centuries worth. She sighed. “The way Mattie talks about it. Cold and echoing regrets and nothing else. I can't bear the idea. I've been there, Laura. In the coffin. All blackness and silence and the only thing to think about was what put me there.”

There was no real answer to that except to hold her tighter.

“I like Sartre most of the time, but he was so wrong about one thing. Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself alone forever.”

“But it's all gone, Carm. You came out. It's behind us.” 

“Yeah. And so was Mattie. And here she is.” She hugged her knees. “But I don't know what I think is worse. Everything I love up here having to go down there – or everything I left down there having to come up.”

“You don't think-” Laura hardly knew what she was going to say, so she let herself tail off. Somewhere in the depths of her head was swimming the face of Danny Lawrence, a long way down but rising.

Carmilla tapped the book. “I don't know. But I've got a long shadow behind me. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it wasn't all regret before I met you. Don't eat him, he's a poet,” she said, mimicking Mattie mimicking her own former self.

Laura checked the cover name. “'Friedrich Hölderlin'. Well, I hope was grateful for what you did.”

Carmilla shrugged. “Difficult to tell really, he went mad. But he kept writing.”

“You'll have to tell me about him. Once you've finished the story about Madame de Pompidou.”

“Pompadour. Pompidou is the name of the building where the modern art gallery is.”

“Well excuse _me_ for not remembering the names of every girl you've ever made out with.” It wasn't real jealousy. She could feel the tone lightening and the darkness beginning to dissipate, but she kept her arms tight around Carmilla.

“You wanted to hear that story. Friedrich's was rather less exciting - and with no making out at all, needless to say. I went to see him again when he was older. He didn't recognise me. But he did tell me all about a dark young woman who once pleaded for his life with an angry god. I think Mother made an impression.”

“He knew she was a god?”

“No, no. He was just a bit obsessed with the Olympian gods. He interpreted everything in terms of them. Great presences, marking the boundaries of the human world, life-giving and terrifying.” She tapped the lines of the poem, closed the book and half-turned. Her eyes were a touch damp, but Laura could see the life back in them.

She kissed Carmilla's cheek. “Well, there you are then. You let him be all crazy for a bit longer. And anyway if we're doing scorecards, we did save the world. That puts us in moral credit for a good long time.”

“Yes. That's something.” A thin smile, the sun beginning to come out. Laura put her hand on Carmilla's chest. She felt the new heartbeat underneath – not quite regular like the ticking of the clock, but with a slightly perceptible increase in speed as Carmilla registered her hand there.

Carmilla put the book down. Around them, the sounds started to filter back in: the birdsong from the garden, the children running down the street, some of Perry's music rising up from the ground floor. 

The shadow passed.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Laura stood and helped Carmilla up.

* * *

“So to recap.” LaFontaine put the summary chart in the middle of the floor, covered with coloured sticky notes. “According to the myth of Inanna, she descended from the Great Above – that's the heavens – to the Great Below – that's the Underworld - through Seven Gates.”

“Right.” Laura held the book open at the relevant page, although by this point it usually fell open there of its own accord. “Except in the real world she was stopped. Enki and Ereshkigal and the Sumerians thought the whole breaking and entering thing was a super bad idea so they imprisoned her in a corpse, carved off pieces of her power into the talismans and bingo – we have the Dean.”

“Yeah. But that's not the end of the story.” LaFontaine tapped the lower part of the chart. “According to the myth she goes down and gets turned into a corpse hung on a hook. But she's arranged already for her servants to resurrect her. Up Inanna gets and climbs back to the surface - followed by demons, like they're supernatural inspectors or something. She's not allowed to leave the underworld without putting somebody in her place. The demons suggest a few candidates which she refuses because they're friends of hers. Only then she happens across her lover Dumuzi who's really doing a bad job at mourning her. Down he goes to the Underworld. In some versions his sister takes his place for six months of each year.”

Laura consulted her notebook. “And we think Dumuzi's the same as Hastur, right? The Dean's lover who she went down to resurrect?”

“Probably. Everyone in these stories has about ten names, it's worse than Tolkien.” LaFontaine rolled their eyes, not approving of inexact nomenclature. “And the trouble is, that's it. That's all that's been preserved of the myth – although weirdly it ends with praise to Ereshkigal, of all people.”

“And you're think that there might have been another version at some point with more stuff in it?”

“Yeah, makes sense. There's got to be a reason why it's in praise of Ereshkigal rather than Inanna. The people who wrote the myth knew _something_ even if they didn't get it totally right, so maybe there's some kind of prophecy or whatever about what would happen after Inanna descended. They just got the details a bit scrambled.”

“And Mattie?”

“Now we've got Belmonde saying she's rising before Ereshkigal, or running away, or dragged up or something like that. I still haven't got the details figured.” LaFontaine flicked through one of their pads of paper. “It is conceivable that the resonance set up with the initial possession resulted in a retention of psychic entanglement at the subconscious level.”

Laura flagged them down with a hand. “I know you're not so keen on the pre-Enlightenment speak LaF, but was that really easier to say than 'their souls are bound forever more'?”

“The important thing is that Belmonde's got an inside line, conscious or not. All we've got to do is figure out a way to persuade Ereshkigal to stay put...” They opened another pad at random, but then shut it as quickly, dragging some papers on top of it.

“Is that even possible?” Laura wanted to know. 

“Just got to find what she wants, that's all. Laura was still looking uncertain, so LaFontaine sat back. “Okay, frosh. What's muddling your neurons?”

Laura shook her head. Yesterday's talk in the attic with Carmilla was preying on her mind. “I don't know exactly. It seems too much like treating all this as if the Death Goddess and whatever are, you know, normal kinds of things you can talk to. I mean, what even _are_ gods?”

They put on one of their faces. “Laura. It's three in the afternoon and we're eating Jammie Dodgers. That kind of question usually requires bourbon and twilight.” She threw a crumb at them and they relented. “All right, all right. I think gods are… super powerful things that mark out territories and like a lot of attention. That makes sense, right? Massively terrifying, ancient, probably unkillable, but when you get down to it they're just like everything else.”

“And the way the library – the god Enki in physical form – existed in multiple dimensions, could pass through alternate universes and quite possibly contained and was contained by everything else doesn't sway you on this?”

“The library was weird,” LaFontaine conceded. “But look. We were all frightened of the Dean and good reason to be, but when it got down to it she was a woman gone mad from grief. And yeah, she might have been a big deal when we were all psyched about fire and using goat innards to predict the weather, but these days we've gone up in the world. Come on – two teenagers and a broody grump were a match for Inanna.”

“I think it was more complicated than that, LaF. The Dean… she was Inanna, yes, but she was more like what was left of Inanna after what the other gods did to her. The talismans weren't just any old items, they were parts of her, broken off. She was,” Laura cast around for a way to express it. “She was like what was left of Voldemort's soul when he'd made all the Horcruxes.”

“Trust you to explain metaphysics with Harry Potter analogies.”

Laura rolled her eyes. “But you get me, right? The Dean was Inanna in the same way. The other gods had tried to imprison her, but they drove her mad as well. Warped and broken and hardly herself any more. When I gave her the last talisman she could put herself back together. Become what she was meant to be.”

“You're not saying World Ending Horror was actually good underneath it all.”

“I don't think that's it either.” She waved her hands, looking for an explanation. “Lions are one of Inanna's symbols, right? Well, lions are dangerous. You don't want to rile one up, but if you know the way they live you can live around them. But you hurt one and torment it and put it in a cage too small to stand up in, you're going to get something that lashes out in all directions.”

“The Dean.”

“Right. So what's muddling my neurons, as you put it, is that we never actually got a look at one of these things in their full, er… fullness. The library was too complicated, Inanna was too stuck-in-a-Perry, Ereshkigal sent a messenger instead.”

“Right. I suppose.” LaFontaine tucked their chin and looked unhappy.

“It's not that I don't share your enthusiasm. I'm just, you know, not keen on jumping to conclusions about what this all means. Remember last time we tried that?” Her gaze flicked to LaFontaine's eyepatch.

“I'll admit there was a certain amount of… eye loss. On account of my not having _completely_ figured out the ramifications of gods walking the earth, but learning from experience is what science is for.” They indicated the accumulated boxes of notes from their last year. Then, relenting, they turned off what Laura thought of as the Tesla Mood. “Don't worry, Laura. I'm not going to do anything stupid on my own. It's good to have a voice of reason about, hey?”

Laura nodded. “No closer to finding a colleague yet?” They had talked about it at one point earlier in the year, building a team to take their work forward.

LaFontaine was short and clipped in their reply. “No. Nobody suitable. Alchemy Club say they'll keep me informed.” They made patterns on the table with a spilled drop of water.

Laura took a little while to gather up the nerve to ask. “You still miss him, don't you? JP?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

That was the most she had ever gotten out of them about their feelings for JP. Whatever had hesitantly half-formed between the two back at Silas had been sealed behind a thick door in LaFontaine's head. Maybe they had spoken to Perry, maybe they hadn't.

She tried to touch their hand, but they had already pulled it off the table and were deep into one of the books with an isolated intensity.

* * *

Mattie seemed to be around a lot in the days after Lola's spell of revelation. Or maybe it just seemed that way because LaFontaine had taken to shutting themselves in one of the spare rooms and filling it with more and more books and screens. They said they were working on extracting common principles from grimoires so as to be able to derive new spells. Laura visited often; Carmilla was hastily summoned whenever the language barrier became insurmountable. They didn't ask for Lola very much.

According to Laura, sometimes they didn't want anyone at all to come into their room. That was a bit troubling. But overall, Lola didn't find herself minding too greatly being out of the mainstream. She was happy to stand on the edge of the research. The others were good at it, after all: they had practised for months and months holed up in the library last year. And besides, somebody had to keep them from getting scurvy while it all happened. She could get along very well with just the morning meetings. In her notebook, she recorded every card reading she made: Hanged Men, always flipped with the lettering upside down, continued to greet her at least once a day.

So with Laura and LaFontaine leading the fruitless research upstairs, Mattie was around a lot. She attended the meetings as well, before swanning off to loll in the garden and read through stacks of Silas books. Apparently her own brand of research went better with a box of cerisettes and a glass of blood in the shade under the pear tree. Nights Lola would lie awake and hear a sash window down the hall slide open and a flurry of wingbeats depart for the night sky.

She was sitting now at the dining table with a pack of cards, swivelling one around and around on the board. As Lola drew closer, she saw that it wasn’t her own tarot pack, but instead an ordinary set of playing cards, in the French style with clubs and spades and diamonds and hearts. Mattie had the Queen of Spades under her fingers and she positioned the card first with one head upright and then the other.

“She’s the same whichever way up you look at her,” Lola said.

“Thank you for that earth-shattering remark, Lola.” She raised her eyebrow at Lola's back stiffening. “I’m thinking.”

“Remembering the high life at Monte Carlo?” It took little imagination to envision Mattie dominating the poker tables and causing hard-nosed men to gulp and suddenly feel insecure. She was surprised when Mattie shook her head.

“A fool’s game, gambling,” she said. “Unless you’ve stacked the odds beforehand. Oh, a skill at cards might be a social accomplishment, but anyone who’s not a mark says goodbye to their money before they enter the casino.”

“That’s oddly… sensible of you.”

“Darling, I have a long life span. You roll a roulette wheel enough times and you’re bound to end on zero sooner or later. It’s how the casinos stay in business. Now apply that to a thousand years. Much better to be the casino in the long run.” She looked archly at Lola. “But I’m glad Betty Crocker approves.”

She wasn't meant to approve of Matska Belmonde, but it seemed self-destructive to protest that fact in front of her. “When you challenged Laura to a game,” Lola began, and then halted, afraid of why she wanted to ask the question.

“When Little Miss English As A First Language chose Scrabble, you mean?” Mattie said, and sighed ruefully. “I did suggest we play in French or Arabic but _no_ , she wanted this ridiculous tongue. 'Quixotry' indeed.”

“Yes, then.” Lola felt a smile flick at the edges of her mouth despite herself. Matska Belmonde, ancient bloodthirsty vampire, very poor loser at boardgames. “You said you used to have your, ah, dinner guests cut cards for their lives.”

Mattie’s teeth were very bright when she grinned. “Oh yes. High card lives, low card dies. Of course, that’s different. It wasn’t anything of mine I was playing with.”

Lola was sorry she'd asked, but Mattie kept her dark eyes on her face. There was mockery and amusement, but also something else - Mattie wanted to see what she'd do next. As she had in the kitchen on the first evening, Lola felt the urge to do something to take that look off her face, if only she could work out what.

“That's not very sporting,” she said weakly.

“It got the heart rates up, I can assure you,” Mattie purred. “I could hear them, hammering away. Say there is a blonde on our left – white gown, beauty spot here,” and she tapped her upper lip, “and some nervous redhead on the right.” She indicated the spaces on the table next to her. The redhead ended up right in front of Lola.

She had the distinct impression that she was being experimented on. It was not nice.

“Mircalla shuffles. She deals out four cards.” Mattie scooped up the Queen of Spades and slipped it back into the middle of the pack. Then she drew one face down. “One for me. One for her. One for the blonde. One for the redhead.” She handed Lola one and she took it, aware of the increasingly unsteady ground, and peeked at it behind her hands. The Two of Hearts.

Mattie moved her lips in a way that sent a shiver through Lola from the top of her head down to her toes. “Mircalla turns hers over, then me. The highest card drinks first. And now they know who'll do the killing. Their turn. Oh, this is the most lovely part.” She shivered herself, in remembered anticipation. “The redhead first. Go on,” she prompted.

Lola stood very still and reminded herself that this was her own home and that this wasn't real. She revealed her card. Matska's smile was wide between red lips.

She turned over the Ace and Lola's breath caught.

“Oh dear, I forgot to say whether aces were high or not. Could go either way now.” She pouted, always the dramatic one. “My my _my_ , to hear the hammering going on over there, it's almost like being back in Versailles.”

Lola hardly needed telling. Her heart was loud in her ears. But Mattie was still waiting for a response. She tried to think of something to say.

At last, trying to keep the quaver out of her words, “Aces low. And high card drinks first. Gin and tonic if you please, Mattie. There's half a lemon in the fridge already.”

Inside her head - relief, shock, thunderous applause. Matska Belmonde put her head back and laughed.

* * *

“So we're on exorcisms now?”

“To call it an exorcism is grossly insufficient,” LaFontaine explained for the thousandth time and pointed to the incomprehensible diagram they had put up on the corkboard and covered in coloured yarn. “This is a custom job. I took a few exorcism spells and filtered out the common elements for amplification. Then I spliced it with the summoning spell we used on Ereshkigal last time and Perr's revealing what is hidden trick.”

“And your method for this was?” Carmilla's face tried out several different styles of skepticism. “I just think we ought to know before your homemade thaumaturgy blows a hole in the fabric of the universe.”

“Come on, these things have got to work somehow.” LaFontaine looked frustrated by everyone's reservations. “Common elements are the clues to mechanism: it's simple systems analysis. Basically I'm thinking reveal death lady with Perry's spell, connect to her with a summoning spell, banish her with the combined force of a dozen exorcisms.”

Mattie curled her fingers around the arm of the sofa. “And I shall be submitting to this indignity why?”

“Spirit of open enquiry?” LaFontaine suggested and got the expected reply. “Saving the world? The opportunity to say 'I told you so' if it goes wrong?”

“That last one. I'll take it.”

They started setting up. Lola did not quite like the amount of magic being performed in her garden of late. The grass was looking a little bit the worse for wear in the area of the circle of salt from last time, and there had been some divots thrown up by Mattie's heels as well. Besides, the neighbours might talk.

LaFontaine positioned Mattie in the middle of a circle, carefully guiding her pose without ever being so foolish as to actually touch her. There were little stakes of rowan wood culled from the nearby park to mark the boundary – and that would muck up the lawn as well, no doubt – and a frankly rather alarming beaker of what smelled like the worst soup mishap Lola had ever experienced.

She wasn't so sure about this cunningly analysed magic kick that LaFontaine was on at the moment. For one thing it sounded uncomfortably like her own teen witch phase. Granted, LaFontaine wasn't talking about the mystical loving vibrations of the Universe with a capital U, but there was still that general optimism that things could be sorted out. There was no mark of doubt in their face as they began the chant, and that was the kind of expression Lola had last worn shortly before releasing Tythia from her ancient prison.

The words felt odd when they came. They weren't… they weren't just heard by her ears, she decided. They had syllables she heard with her soul. Then she felt stupid and wondered what on earth she was thinking of to have verbalised that last thought to herself. How do you hear things with your soul?

Laura joined in on the other side of the grass.

Lola tried to keep the churning in her stomach under control. Mattie's face in the circle was unaffected by LaFontaine and Laura's invocation, but there was surely something wrong. She knew it, she could feel it. The panic was rising up in her throat.

“Zi dingi Irkalla kanpa. Zi dingi Irkalla kanpa. Zi-”

“No,” she whispered, and Carmilla cast a curious glance at her. There was a lot going on inside her head, and somehow the scene in her garden was just the tip of the iceberg. She should be able to remember why it was on the tip of her mind.

The trouble was, she realised as the thought crept in unbidden and unexplained, that if you went right three times you would go left, and see yourself from the back-

LaFontaine was waving their wand more vigorously now, and their splashing of the malodorous mixture over her grass was becoming more generous.

“If a girl jumps up, she falls back down.” Lola whispered out loud. Her legs were feeling a bit unsteady. The ground didn't feel like it was in the proper place below her.

“Perry?” said Carmilla.

_But that was only half the question, since if a girl fell back down she'd have to jump forward-_

“Perry, you're not OK. Stay upright, stay up with me. Laura? LaF! Something's up with Perry.”

_And if_ she _couldn't jump forward, then someone else would have to do it for her-_

“Perr? Hey Perr, what's going on in there?”

Sinking, thrumming, buzzing into her head and her hands snapped back and forth as if pulling at chains that strung her in all directions. Somebody was trying to hold her, but it was the wrong person. Above her was the ground below her and the sky beneath her feet.

_Round and around-_

“-the mulberry bush-”

“Lola, what-”

It was coming. She screamed. It drove her down to her knees, and then forced her upright again, throwing Carmilla backwards onto the ground stunned. Laura came forward with a cry, but Lola batted her off and she went flying across the garden to tumble like a ragdoll in the rose bushes. 

Her mouth opened to scream again, but it came out deep and fierce as a lion's roar. Heat bubbling in her fingers, and bile in her mouth as she spat curses at those who opposed her.

Mattie pushed the others behind her, but Lola snarled at her face and struck. The vampire's face registered shock as she was crumpled to the ground. Lola looked at her with rage spilling from the lions in her eyes. It was the look of death. She spoke to her. It was the speech of anger. She shouted at her. It was the shout of heavy guilt.

_Get Down, Sister Mine_ , she spoke or thought or screamed. There didn't seem to be a difference in her head. Everything overflowed, galloping forward and dragging her behind with no reins.

Mattie rolled, feinted, and twisted her onto the ground in a tangle of limbs. They fought like that, and somewhere Laura was shouting and Carmilla was bellowing to LaFontaine about breaking the circle.

It was all over. The roaring left her and she was limp in Mattie's arms with the taste of blood and ashes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Carmilla reads is _Brod und Wein_ by Friedrich Hölderlin.
> 
> By the way, if you want to read the Sumerian account of the Descent of Inanna, the good people at Oxford have produced a handy online corpus of Sumerian literature translations – [see here](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr141.htm).


	6. Oh Time, Thy Pyramids

Night was already falling over Silas University by the time they arrived. Lola was nodding gently in her uncomfortable seat in the large taxi. LaFontaine was apparently listening to an audiobook, but the strand of drool from the corner of their mouth suggested otherwise. Laura was on the grumpy come-down from all the sweets she'd guzzled in the first half-hour from Graz, restrained from huffing more only by Carmilla's hand on her thigh. Lola couldn't see what Mattie was doing in the front seat, but she'd made her views on the shortcomings of shared, publicly used taxis clear enough at the airport. So she was probably curling her lips at the dusty smell in the way she did so well.

Silas had taken the view that it would be foolish to refuse urgent requests from the trio who saved the world, especially when accompanies by a goddess' previous bodily host turned generous sponsor and a former chair of the board who was also a vampire. Lola had been afraid that in the circumstances they might be put up in the Dean's house, but it had apparently been razed to the ground and heavily warded with bloodstones as the first priority of the new administration. Instead there was a building genuinely used by visiting professors and it had a scattering of abandoned grant proposals to prove it. 

There was a general movement to claim rooms and, for most people, to sleep. Matska Belmonde kept to her nocturnal wakefulness and went abroad in the small hours, unseen under the revolving stars. LaFontaine rearranged cards and symbols in their dream, shifting and shuffling until the kaleidoscopic patterns formed the outlines of a face. Laura was warm in the Venetian afternoon, and even the way the canals reflected more people below than walked the streets above could not disrupt her slow dance with Carmilla. Carmilla's own dream was of climbing, one hand over the other up a rock face as white lace flapped at her wrists.

Lola herself dreamed of lions. She walked unafraid between ranks of them and answered them in echoes of their own roars. Their claws were bloody and so was the mess under her fingernails. Triumph over the fallen. There was a ball of heat in her belly and she felt the blood thrumming through her flesh.

She woke unbidden and lay there waiting to be disturbed, but somehow it didn't happen. She sat up against the unsatisfactory pillows and made an effort. Blood and roaring and picked bones on the sand were vivid in her mind, but all she could feel was warm and content. But not sleepy any more. She checked her watch – only two in the morning.

In the ordinary course of things Lola believed firmly in the importance of regular bedtimes and a night routine that promoted good sleep hygiene by means of excluding distractions. On the other hand, long periods of lying in the pillows and not falling back to sleep were scarcely enjoyable either, so she put on the lights and found her slippers and dressing gown.

Her embroidery was downstairs; she had left one of her two cases in the living room on arrival. She padded down to find the room submerged in a kind of quiet she had learned to recognise in the preceding week or so back at home.

“We really are making a habit of this,” she commented to no particular direction.

“Darling, I'm the one who's meant to be nocturnal,” Mattie purred from one of the patches of shadow. She flicked a light on – it had not apparently been necessary for her to read by anything more than the vague halo of the outside lights that marked the paths through campus. “Have you mentioned your recent lack of sleep to any of your little friends, Lola?”

She hadn't. Weirdly, it didn't seem necessary. Not every night now but fairly often, between the hours of two and four, she stopped being able to sleep. Several times, and on the last three occasions consecutively, she had got up on some pretext and found Mattie awake and about. It had been alarming the first time, and she had fled as soon as it was polite. The second, there had been some reason offered to stay.

So she shook her head. “I feel fine during the day,” she said. “So maybe it's healthy.”

“Maybe. People used to, you know.” Mattie folded herself back into her chair and pulled a blanket around her. Hardly necessary for warmth on a summer night. “Before gas and electricity and when candles were expensive, a lot of people would have two phases of sleep. Early to bed, you see.”

Lola chose her own seat, not quite next to Mattie but near enough to talk. The previous evenings had removed most – if not all – of the fear of imminent evisceration from their encounters. Plus Mattie could even be an interesting person to talk to if you could keep her off the subject of power and domination. “What did they do in the middle, when they were awake?”

Mattie shrugged, the blanket moving interestingly around her. “Search me, I wasn't exactly lurking inside at those times. Better things to do. But something vaguely lurid with their bedmates, I have no doubt.”

Lola rescued her embroidery from the suitcase and moved a light to focus on her lap. It was necessary to concentrate a little to get into the rhythm, and then she could carry on as by automatic.

“How was your walk?”

“It's good to be back. Especially in the summer, with only postgraduates and faculty around. It's so much quieter.” She ran a finger around the rim of her glass – the blood had, of course, already been unpacked and carefully stored in the fridge. “The climate's not so bad in summer, either. Better than the ice-blasted wasteland you have in January.”

“Hopefully we'll all have a better time than last year.” It was a bland thing to say, but the hope was genuine.

“Certainly I think there could be a few improvements to the social scene. Ones that don't involve having my new wardrobe ruined by holy water.” Lola dropped a stitch, and could practically hear Mattie smile in satisfaction. 

“I was a little possessed at the time,” she muttered.

“Quite. On that matter, you swore to Young Frankenstein earlier you've had no further moments of goddess possession,” Mattie observed. “I take it that was the truth?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Thought I might make sure you weren't... hiding something. Nor I.”

“Which makes sense. Inanna only got involved with me when LaF was trying to muck around with Ereshkigal via you. She – I mean, Inanna – sounded like she was more concerned with keeping you – I mean Ereshkigal,” Lola added hurriedly, “keeping her down.”

“Hmm.”

“Can't you predict what she's going to do? She was your mother, after all.”

“Inanna wasn't really my mother, darling. Mother was... Inanna mad and shattered and in a cage. Like the cub reporter says, she had to be broken down into kit form to even be confined inside that corpse she wore. Before you offered her a makeover, that is.” 

Lola bit her lip and watched Mattie survey the room in thought.

“So I don't know what the new improved goddess is going to want. It's a little unsettling. If it were Mother again, you'd know what to expect. There's something so reliable about being taken apart and tortured, don't you think? Whereas now we've got these ancient unkillable forces just hanging around not doing anything obviously threatening.”

And that was an experience Lola had two copies of, one of them in this room. She didn't say that, but Mattie must have caught the thought.

“I can hear what your heartbeat did then, Lola. I know you're still scared of me.” She didn't say it in criticism, merely in observation. But that was unpleasant enough, and Lola felt a perverse desire to prove she wasn't really afraid.

She gathered up her breath, before realising Mattie would be able to hear that too. “Well... maybe you can,” she said inadequately. “And maybe I am. But I've been scared of worse things than you, and I'm still here. And now I'm saying all this out loud,” she said, wondering why on earth she was continuing, “and you're just listening to me and frankly if I knew that this was where my life would end up when I was a child, I'd probably have stayed at home, so-”

Mattie's expression had passed through amusement into a sort of admiration for the persistent verbal flood.

“-maybe I'm just going to continue and tell off the tenth-century vampire for not using a coaster, because my life can't get any weirder.”

“Bravo.” Mattie mimed clapping. “Also, you have a psychic connection to an ancient goddess of love and war, which is most becoming on a young lady and would probably earn you your youthful self's admiration.” She watched Lola curse herself for blushing, took a sip of blood and replaced the glass on a coaster plucked from the coffee table.

“But in any case,” she went on, “I've not had any more stirrings since the last time the Ghostbusters decided to poke me with a wand and shout incomprehensible jargon. So that removes some of the urgency and will allow me to concentrate on business. If our glorious campaign leader doesn't have better plans.”

“You know, for all your sarcasm, you're letting Laura take the lead a lot. You're what, a thousand year-old vampire with enormous experience in supernatural affairs?”

“Oh, there have been affairs all right.” She waited for Lola to blush before continuing. “The cupcake is having fun, and not actively getting in the way of my re-acquaintance with physical existence. And she's good at it! The essence of running large organisations is delegation, you know. Besides – and don't tell her I told you this – she's quite adorable. Even Ereshkigal was rather charmed.”

There were two parts of Lola: one which wanted to tell Laura that her ancient vampire sister-in-law had a soft spot for her, and one which preferred to bask in the implied flattery of being apparently the only person allowed to hear that fact.

* * *

Morning at Silas again – an odd feeling. The beds in the guest house were no wider than the old singles back in the lost and ruined Crowley Building, but that wasn't something to complain about when you had such a cuddly partner. Laura half-surfaced from the underworld of dreams and managed to adjust herself into a place where the light would strike her eyes and wake her up properly eventually.

After breakfast Perry, in her role as schedule co-ordinator, decreed that the first day at Silas was for a campus tour and settling in. Nobody had complaints to make. 

The campus still had broken and chaotic grounds in place of the normal flat open lawns, but they were making the best of it with interestingly shaped plantings and rockeries. The pit was fenced off and a timber shelter had been erected over it to keep people out. By the South Lawn – which sprouted these days with remarkably summer-tolerant mushrooms - was the first place they had to visit.

Laura found the walk across the winding paths uncertain. There was something like deja-vu about it. Of course, that was ridiculous because she _had_ been here before. For a year. All the same, it felt to her as if she was remembering a dream. All around her was a quiet campus during holiday time with only graduate students enjoying their brief period of dominance and the odd professor coming outside now that it was safe. There was an incoherence – the world of ancient gods and pain and death ran up against the world of sunshine and Paris and Carmilla's hand around hers. Impossible, somehow, that they could both be true.

The memorial was a long, low wall of basalt and weathered brass, curving gently around an oval of grass and flowerbeds. Laura slowed down as she approached it. Some of the names were familiar: _Sarah-Jane Bannerman, Corrina Scott, Nazneen Ramanujan, Samuel David Ellis_. Dozens of others were less so. 

After much discussion, the name of Theo Straka had been omitted. After much insistence and considerable debate about spelling, the names of two former board members had been included: _Ukuku, Prophetess of Eridu_ and _Ambrose Y'Prntln-F'taghn, Order of the Monks of Hastur_. Nobody had even suggested that the Baron be memorialised, and in any case the distant Dutch cousin who had inherited was keen to extinguish all connections to Silas University.

She sat down on the grass at one end and traced the name _Danny Lawrence (1994-2015)_. 

Carmilla nudged up behind her and Laura let her head fall back against her girlfriend's knees. The fingers through her hair kept her in the present. It was good, actually. She didn't know how she had expected to feel back here, but perhaps it was all right. The sunshine, and the roses, and the clean neat name which everyone could see and know. In this world, the one where she was now: past and future separated by a carved stone.

There was a line of poetry surfacing from somewhere at the bottom of her mind. On a war memorial, something like that?

“ _When you go home, tell them of us and say_ ”

Carmilla stirred, recognising it, but did not interrupt.

“ _For their tomorrow, we gave our today._ ” Laura took a breath and stood up. “How's that?”

“That'll do well, cupcake. Come on.” Carmilla took her arm and led Laura to join the others, standing at a distance. She thought about exchanges and sacrifices. Everything seemed to come with a cost and a compensation, like a pendulum you couldn't push one way without it swinging back and hitting your friends.

One important name had not been on the main memorial at all. They found him elsewhere, on a bronze plaque in the great entrance hall to the Library. On one of the pillars supporting the great and spreading stone arches, it read:

_JP Armitage_  
_1853 - 1874_  
_and 2015_

This was followed by a string of cuneiform symbols before the epitaph:

_Oh time, thy pyramids._

LaFontaine traced the letters. “His last words,” they explained, though nobody needed it explaining. They had all heard the words, whispered and yet somehow audible throughout the stale air of the entire Library, burned onto Laura's video at the moment of his death and of her return from the other place.

“Who put the plaque up?” Mattie asked. She had been looking into the corners of the Library, not seeming entirely comfortable in that space. Of course she had, as Laura remembered, tried to attack it once and take away portions of the collection. But the tesseracting book nook didn't appear to be holding a grudge, or at least not acting on one right now.

“Nobody. We were going to include him in the main memorial, but then this just appeared one morning. Guess the Library wanted to do the honours itself. I suppose you could say they were close.”

“And the Sumerian? Or is it Proto-Akkadian?”

“High Priest of Enki,” Carmilla translated. “Not bad for a boy from Guildford.”

“The epitaph is from Borges.” Nobody had asked, but LaFontaine spoke anyway. Their voice was precise, without expression. They had gone over it, in public and their own mind, many times. “He loved the writing of Borges. It's from a story called _The Library of Babel_ , all about an infinite Library, made of endless rooms all stacked with every possible book.” They looked around at the shadowed galleries leading off to the depths.

“The narrator had lived his entire life in that place. The trouble was, because it contained all possible books, for every book there was an equal and opposite book. Proofs of philosophical concepts, and refutations of those proofs, and refutations of those refutations. Worse, most of them were just random jumbles of letters. The narrator says that in one gallery not far from where he was born, there was a book entirely without order or sense, until the last page that read _oh time, thy pyramids_. There was nothing else.”

People shuffled their feet. Even Mattie was without a jibe, and Laura wondered whether she had it in her to mourn her strange, temporary replacement step-brother. But LaFontaine had not finished their recitation.

“Mel saw him. She talked about it in her podcast. She said he was strung up. Wires everywhere. He was _glowing_ , she said.” They accelerated, rattling through the litany.

“LaF, you don't have to-” Perry tried to take hold of them, but they hardly noticed. 

But they ignored her and kept talking furiously. “She tried to take the wires off when she found him but it hurt too much. His eyes were burned out.” Laura shuffled her feet, letting Perry do the comforting. She snatched their hand away from its plucking at their eyepatch.

“It's fine. It's done now.” They straightened up and managed a weak smile of thanks to Perry. “Right, I'm going to go find my old lab. No, I can't go back now. I need to gather some materials that will be useful.” They gently removed Perry's hand from theirs and marched into the Library.

“They-”

“They'll be okay, I think,” Perry said. She sighed. “They won't talk about it, ever. Not even to me. I've told them, expressing their- but no. All that emotional stuff is meant to be second place. They'd rather experiment than deal with it.”

“LaF got pretty emotional about you being missing,” Carmilla offered.

“Yeah. That's what it took to break through.”

* * *

“Where's your keeper, Kitty-cat?” It was afternoon and by common consent, everyone was settling in.

“Somewhere off keeping LaF company,” Carmilla said without thinking, and then caught Mattie's gleeful expression. “Hey, she is not my keeper!”

“Could have fooled me. All those adorable little collars.” She tugged on Carmilla's choker. “And there was me last year warning you about having pets. Should have been directing all that to the cupcake.” She patted the cushion beside her and Carmilla toppled herself over the back of the sofa and sat down.

“And how are you enjoying the slightly less than luxurious accommodation, sis?”

“It's not quite Mother's apartment, is it? Or Lola's home comforts. But it has its compensations. Three faculty members practically jumped out of their skin when we were going around, did you notice? They looked like they'd seen a ghost. Delicious.” She looked very pleased with herself.

“I suppose they thought they'd seen the last of you.”

“Foolish creatures. Death and taxes, they say. Well, I've been one and what with the blurring of private and public sectors these days I may be the other before long.” Her eyebrows danced. 

“Bleeding them dry, hey?” Carmilla spotted that the pile of magazines on the side table were financial publications. Mattie may have been presumed dead and out of action for a year but if she knew her sister then the appropriate levers to recover her empire were already being pulled.

“That's the plan. Oh, it's good to be back on the surface again, so much more to do. I missed both London Fashion Weeks last year! So I do hope we can get this little spat cleaned up before the end of August or I'll be out of temper for months.”

“There's always Milan.”

“Oh, I know, but it's the principle of the thing. Speaking of events, you need to tell me when you and your attachée can come to Rabat. It's been a while since you've come to Dar Naji.”

Carmilla poked her affectionately on the cheek. Mattie batted her off and continued her roster of haute cuisine and fashion appointments. “And Paris! I know you've been slumming it, but I am coming to take you to L'Astrance for dinner. Good company is so essential to fusion cuisine.”

“Speaking of company, you and Perry are pretty chummy these last couple of weeks.” 

Mattie's expression was a theatrical mask of innocence. “Curly Sue? Do we seem so? Oh, but then your human self can't hear the panic in her heartbeat, can you?” But Carmilla put on her pleading sister face. No games.

“Look Mattie, Raggedy Anne's my friend. Much as it pains me to say it - and please never tell her I said so - but she is. So if you've got on one of your twisted games that result in people being found bloodless and artfully positioned in a maze-”

“When have I ever-”

“Hampton Court? 1756?”

“That was a one time thing!” She toyed with honesty. “Two time thing. Look, I'm not so stupid as to play hunting games with a girl who's the number one choice as Inanna's mortal mouthpiece. Lola simply has the capacity to be amusing company.”

“You turned a entire choir into a blood sacrifice to quiet a hungry valley in the Apennines. She knits doilies and tea cosies.”

“She also listens politely to graphic death threats and suggests that I might want to wait until I'm not wearing white satin to spill her guts. You've got to admit, that's actually pretty funny.” She broke out laughing. “God, do you remember that opera singer in, hmm, 1803 who asked us to wait until the interval to-”

Carmilla grimaced and pulled the subject back on track. “She's got... elaborate coping mechanisms. You know back when I met Laura, Perry was insisting that I was a 'light averse octogenarian with extreme haemoglobin deficiency and really good skin'? She saw me carrying a hundred pound duffel bag and commended me for really giving it my all at the gym.”

Mattie laughed. “It doesn't surprise me. Lola can be such a darling like that – she's almost stopped flinching when I reminisce about old dinner dates.”

“Have you killed anyone since coming back?”

“Sis-”

“Have you?”

“No.” She pouted. “I've been living off the blood bags, as I promised you I would. No sense attracting attention at the moment. I do see your point, even if the lack of death threats and screaming can really get a girl down.”

“That's all? Blood bags?”

“Well. I may have snacked a little. In some of the parks back in Germany. If I get energetic here, there are Styrian villagers beyond the Tief Urwald.” She sighed. “I didn't kill anyone, before you ask. Just had a little bite.”

“Does Laura know? Does Perry?”

“They choose not to ask, I assume. Anyway, when did you get so squeamish?”

“You told me you'd earned all your regrets down there. The long echoes, you said.”

“Yes.”

“And now you're up here again it's business as usual, is it?”

Mattie didn't reply at once. She picked up her glass of blood and watched the light shine off the surface. “More or less,” she said eventually. I'm not planning on dying again, after all.” She made an ironic toast, which failed to raise a smile from her sister.

“And you think you can prevent it? Mattie, I was going to live forever. Inanna gave me my life back and you warned me not to throw it away. _She won't go easy on you_ , you said. Are you really trying to earn more regrets?”

“Mircalla Henriette Karnstein, you are in no position to moralise. But then,” she added, “you've got the human condition now. The moral tenor always did resonate with you. Look: I'd be lying if I said it doesn't cause a change in perspective. But my memories of it are far too blurry for drastic action, and I suspect that after that clearing house of psychological baggage is dealt with, eating and being eaten are all much the same. Integration of psyche trumps angsting, darling.”

* * *

One side effect of the current programme of research was that card games were the obvious form of relaxation; consequently LaFontaine was winning a tidy pile of matchsticks on a regular basis. Belmonde refused to gamble with money, partly for reasons of her own and partly because she was temporarily between fortunes. Carmilla likewise declined on the basis that LaFontaine was probably counting cards. 

LaFontaine was, naturally, counting cards. What was the point of playing if you weren't in it to maximise odds by stretching your awareness to memorise the whole game? The way some people talked about card-counting, you'd think it was cheating. Besides, even their best techniques couldn't raise the odds too far.

“Fine.” Carmilla threw down her hand and shoved the pile of sticks towards LaFontaine's end of the table. “I'm done.” She swivelled in the chair and resumed her characteristic posture folded in remarkable angles over the arms and back.

“A lovely pile of non-monetary tokens for me, then.” LaFontaine scooped them up into a circular heap in the centre.

“Right, washing up done.” Laura and Perry came in from the kitchen. “Who won?”

“Bio major,” muttered Carmilla. “They're lucky they're indispensable or they'd be hung up by their ankles.”

“Thank you, broody and mature ex-vampire. I, too, value this friendship.” LaFontaine raised their hand for Perry to high-five in the exceptionally gentle way she always did. She dropped into the space between them and Belmonde, receiving a wink from the latter.

“Inanna's up,” Belmonde commented, her cryptic way of restarting the conversation.

Perry blushed at the sudden tense scrutiny. “Don't look at me! I don't know what she's talking about. What _can_ you mean?” she added to Belmonde.

She nodded to the window. Although late, the summer sun was only now disappearing below the horizon. Some way above it and to the left there was a point of yellow-white light: the planet Venus, Inanna to the Sumerians.

“Way to creep us all out, Belmonde,” LaFontaine said. She ignored them.

They squinted their eye at the tiny yellow blob. It wasn't quite clear without binoculars or a telescope, but it looked to be in half-phase. Not quite a circle.

“Why is Inanna Venus?” Perry wanted to know. 

They shrugged. “Gods are often planets in mythology. They move independently of the other stars, sometimes they appear in unexpected places. I mean,” they clarified rapidly, “they can seem to appear in unexpected places if you haven't developed a sufficiently nuanced model.”

“Inanna is Venus, because she descends into the underworld at the end of the day and arises again in the morning on the other horizon,” was Carmilla's own response to Perry's question.

“Not to be overly literal here,” Laura said, “but wouldn't that get kind of confusing in the whole mythological way? I mean, Venus does it every day. Right?” She glanced a LaF for conformation and received a non-committal hand gesture that replaced the technically necessary discussion of the planet's occlusion. “You've got this thing that happens in myth once being enacted every day in the sky. Like, did people not find that weird?”

“Hmm.” Carmilla tried to explain. “It's not quite how the Sumerians or whoever thought about it. Myths aren't these failed explanations or false histories. They're more like... expressions of something that's always going on. Like all the gods who die in the autumn and come back to life in the spring.”

LaFontaine made a noise. “And how does that tie in to actual, literal big powerful monstrosities possessing Perry? Or those people who claimed to have met Pan or whoever when they were going to the shops?” 

Carmilla conceded the point. “Okay, but what about Aphrodite? Or Venus - the goddess, I mean? They're the star too, as well as Inanna. You know, everyone had their own gods of this or that and they didn't really see a contradiction in those days. It's not like under Christianity or Islam where there's got to be one way of seeing things.” A thought struck her. “Actually, have you ever thought what a coincidence it is that all the gods we've met are Sumerian? Or Sumero-Babylonian, whatever. Where's Zeus? Where's Odin?”

“Sis, don't be encouraging them. We've got problems enough,” Mattie put in. But something had obviously struck Carmilla. She was sitting forward in her chair, and the omnipresent movement of her fingers over Laura's knee had stopped. She spoke slowly.

“Think culture. Think language. There's nothing right about calling a dog 'dog', or 'chien', or 'hund'. All that matters is that there's a system that you can learn and that other people can learn. You can say everything with a language, even if there are other languages you can also say everything with.” She pushed some hair distractedly out of her eyes. “We've been trying to work out the proper way to interpret Curly's cards. But let's say that divination works. That means something – the universe or whatever – is trying to communicate, trying to be comprehensible. Well then, we don't need a print-out of every possible system, we need fluency in a language. Any language.”

“A system of differences and oppositions...” LaFontaine discovered they were rubbing their fingers together as they did when an idea was not quite at the surface. “We've seen that before, can't remember where. Laura – the box of dream interpretation, over by your chair.”

The files of research, partly from Perry's house and partly from LaFontaine's own research career, were not well labelled. Most of them were still in one of a half dozen cardboard file boxes, and Laura selected the one she thought LaFontaine was most likely pointing at. She slipped the lid off and frowned. At the top of the jumble of paper inside was a large print-out of one of Perry's cards, the Hierophant. The High Priest – or the Pope in some decks, apparently – sitting on a throne with crossed keys at his feet. Peaking up from below was the edge of a screenshot, something from one of her videos but she couldn't see from which one.

“Hierophant?” she asked, and LaFontaine half stood.

“No, not that box,” they said, leaning over to push the lid back on sharply. “That one.”

Laura shot a glance which they would not meet. “What's in that one?”

“Nothing. Just some materials I might need. Actually,” they corrected hurriedly, “let's not get sucked in again tonight. Research is for tomorrow.”

There was quiet which they filled by suggesting, “Poker?”


	7. The System of the World

From the top of the Senate House tower, the campus lay spread out below her. Lola followed the paths cutting through green lawns until the edges of the campus were cut by a chequerboard of meadows and forests leading up into the mountains. From up here, it looked much cleaner. The people down there walking around would be complicated if you got close, with strange quirks and tied-up emotional lives, but up here they were too far down for their faces to be individually distinguishable.

That must be why the ancients had imagined the gods as being up in the sky or on a very high mountain. Everything down below just seemed smaller. Lola frowned at a possible objection, wondering how that might account for gods of the underworld. But then, maybe it worked the same way if you went deep enough. It was the distance that made people seem small. And with a round world, go downwards for long enough and you'd find yourself going up again.

That probably didn't make a lot of sense, but she hadn't said it out loud so it was all right.

The vantage point might be why the gods were capricious as well. Would they really feel any pity if one of those little ants or smudged dots hanging around the Robespierre Building stopped moving forever? If somebody offered them a prize or a wager or a game for stopping the most dots in their tracks, wouldn't they do it without a conscience?

That whole idea sounded familiar. It took her a moment – The Third Man. The black and white film with the catchy zither theme. Her grandfather had loved it. The villain doing his wicked 'who are you to judge me' speech on the great Ferris wheel in the middle of Vienna. Rising up to the sky with the hero, watching everyone below turn into ants and making his play – but no, said the hero, and down they went again because all movement was in a circle and he was glad of his choice when he saw the faces at ground level again.

“Reminiscing, Lola?” Mattie stepped onto the roof terrace from behind her.

She didn't turn. “How did you know I was up here?”

“Who said I did?” Mattie leaned on the balcony rail. Lola watched her left hand with its small, interesting patchwork of scars at the base of the index finger and compared it with her own right hand only an inch away. “It's a fine place to contemplate the mountains without a thousand sheep-like humans clogging up the view.” She gestured at the spreading peaks in the distance, blue in the haze of last night's evaporating rain.

“You must have seen, what, a hundred years of Silas students?”

“More or less. They all start to look the same after a while.” A flash of teeth and lips. “Present company excepted, of course.”

“Of course.” There was a way to take that as a compliment, and a way to take it as a dismissal. She could choose, she thought. 

“I suppose they must start to echo each other,” she said instead. “Even when I was in third year, I looked at some of the freshers and thought they could be variations on a theme. Mel's hair, Elsie's way of talking, Sam's dress sense, all bundled up together. Like there was a whole person somewhere and everyone I saw was a partial reflection.”

“Or like your cards?”

“Yes.” She hadn't really thought of that before, but Mattie was right. Once you'd seen a lot of people, they started to rhyme with each other until you had them sorted into ideal groups. Like the cards, events and moods sorted into prototypes.

They stood there in silence for a while, watching the morning become midday. Lola was conscious of something that had been growing in their recent meetings, a sense of there being something unsaid. It was tense, but not unpleasant. She circled around it.

“Did you used to come here often, when you were board chair?” she asked.

“Never.”

So this was a game, like everything else Mattie did. Never come here before – which if she was telling the truth meant she _had_ come to see Lola. And it also meant she was letting Lola know that, but in a way she could deny. And Mattie would know that Lola knew that, so the game was an invitation to pick her countering move.

“I'm surprised,” she said, looking straight ahead and seeing Mattie's face turned towards her out of the corner of her eye. “I thought you'd like the solitude. It's why I came here.”

“Oh? Avoiding people, Lola?” There was a movement to her right, of attention being turned to her. A result.

She completed her move. “We all need to get beyond the reach of living souls now and again.”

There was a small – just a very small – pause before Mattie chuckled. “Disappointed?” she asked.

“Not at all.” She smiled to show it, and it came very easily. 

“Scared?”

“Hardly.” Mattie wasn't getting her reaction this time. “Now I think it's you who are disappointed. I know how you like cringing terror.”

There was something in Mattie's smile that was different than usual. She leaned back and stepped away from the railing, trailing her fingers on it before letting go to meander around the rooftop. Lola turned to watch her and the way the wind caught at her hair.

She had white teeth, and her fangs came out to such a length as she approached Lola. There was no way to the left or to the right, the only escape blocked by death and beauty and dark eyes. She opened her arms as if to dance and there were claws on the ends.

But all this was a game still, a mere shuffling and dividing of roles to give form and structure to the encounter. Mattie was playing Death now just as she'd been playing The Empress a moment ago. The challenge was simply to find the correct answer. So Lola did what nobody had ever done to Matska Belmonde on such an occasion and pecked a kiss on her cheek just to see the look on her face, before pushing past her and skipping down the steps to the ground.

* * *

Laura found LaFontaine sorting away piles of equipment she half-recognised from their stint hiding in the Library. On their desk was a large plate of fudge, decorated with a doily. Perry's work: barely two days and she already had the inadequate kitchen turning out fudge.

“How are you doing?”

“I'm good. Been sorting some of this material.” They directed her to one of the two chairs and firmly fitted some lids. Then two of the boxes were pushed to the back and miscellaneous paper dumped on them. So that wasn't suspicious at all, but there was no point questioning them about it.

The door opened. “Carm! You are just in time. We were just about to start today's fruitless research discussion.” She shot a glance at LaFontaine, who straightened up and looked more focused at the mention of work that needed doing.

“My favourite. Mattie's not coming, she's reassembling her empire. Something about Monaco and the Channel Islands and secret reactivation codes. I didn't understand a word. Any idea where Susie Homemaker's got to?”

“The cleaning supplies weren't up to the job,” LaFontaine reported. “Apparently the visiting professors were somewhat sloppy. So she's concocting something stronger and meanwhile we get caramelised sugar products as the most sterile option.” They handed around the plate of fudge.

“Right.” Laura put on her investigation leader voice. “So item one on the agenda: we need to figure out _why_. Since spells are currently... a bit worrying in what they make happen, we're down to good old detective work. And as we all know, figure out the motive and you've got your criminal. Carm.”

“Seems to me big Inanna has some major beef with her sister coming up here,” Carmilla offered, “if she was sending a warning via Perry. So maybe Ereshkigal wants something Inanna has.”

“Okay. Sounds possible. LaF.”

The conversation took time, moving around and around in circles. There were several contradictory theories at present, and every suggestion had to be fitted into each of them in turn. As Laura understood matters, Ereshkigal had helped free Inanna from the broken form that was the Dean. Helped in her own menacing, killing people kind of way, but helped nonetheless. And that should have brought everything back into balance. After all, the whole sorry affair had started those millennia ago when Inanna tried to free Hastur from the Underworld. And presumably she'd learned her lesson about letting go, because she wasn't trying any more and her spell to free him lacked the right talisman and so it hadn't completed-

“Holy crap.” Laura sat bolt upright in her seat. “She did. _I_ did. I completed the spell.”

“What?”

“Everything she did, she did with the talismans. And it didn't work, because she took something that had to be freely given. But then I gave it to her.” She felt Carmilla's hand tighten around her knee at the word 'gave' and the memory of what that entailed.

“And saved us all, frosh,” LaFontaine put in to lighten the mood.

“Well yes, but if it completed _that_ spell, why not the other one? The one she did to free her lover, that used the heart as well.” She looked from Carmilla to LaFontaine and back in wonder. “She got him back. She got her Hastur.”

LaFontaine blinked. “Which no doubt contributed to her chilling out significantly. Huh. So I'm adding 'resurrected a god' to your list of achievements.” They clapped Laura on the back.

“No, but you don't understand. In the story, the poem.” Laura grabbed the coloured chart of Inanna's descent myth and threw it over the top of the table. “In the poem, she has to find a replacement because nobody can come out of the underworld without providing a substitute. And then later in the legend, Dumuzi or Hastur or whatever we're calling him got let off by his sister. But we're not in the legend. Who took Hastur's place in the real world?”

“Ah. Nobody?” Carmilla leaned over Laura's lap and bit her lip.

“Yeah. So we're out of balance.”

“You reckon we should find a volunteer? Because I think we've done our underworld exchanges for the rest of our lives, cupcake.”

Laura winced, but continued the bubbling line of thought. “I think we've got bigger problems than that. Hastur was a god. An honest to goodness Alpha and Omega god, even if he was a bit over concerned with sheep. How many human souls do you need to cancel out a god?”

“Particularly since Death Lady pretty much has every human in the bag anyway if she waits long enough...” ventured LaFontaine.

“Right, they might not count for much. So she needs a large number.”

“A large supply.”

“A world's worth.” Laura sat back. It wasn't proof. It wasn't as if they had an affidavit from the goddess. But all this back-and-forth, to-and-fro, it had to mean something. “She needs a world's worth to compensate her for her loss. Oh, I hate these gods and their stupid rules.”

It took a while to digest the suggestion.

“Do we know how far she's got? It's been so quiet since the... you know, the spell where Perry went all Wrath of God.”

“No.” LaFontaine gnawed on a knuckle. “Radio silence. But the only way to find out is to poke Belmonde again, and you know what happens then. We don't even know if we'd expect signs. Other than the ones we've already had, I mean.”

“That's probably enough to get thinking about for now. Come on. Need some carbs, some caffeine.” Laura dragged Carmilla up and the three of them left LaFontaine's bedroom. From the bottom of the rickety and dusty stairs came the sound of voices raised.

In the living room, Mattie was feinting left and right, trying to snatch something Perry held behind her back. 

“I need it!” Perry protested. 

“It's mine, little girl. Do you think I forgive blatant theft? I, Matsk-”

“Get over yourself, it's nail polish remover.” Perry caught Laura's eye and flashed a very un-Perry like grin at her. “The big bad vampire is in a huff over a bottle of acetone. Have you ever seen such pettiness?”

“Why-?”

“A former tenant spilled something on the big hob which I'm pretty sure is paint. I'm restoring the oven – which will be to the advantage of us all,” she added pointedly, which earned her a deliberate and excessive sneer in return from Mattie.

“Then I demand compensation.” She glanced down and tucked her blouse. “You will provide a substitute.”

“I gave you fudge,” Perry pointed out. There was a plate balanced on top of a pile of magazines on the coffee table.

“Hmm, true.” She tossed a piece into her mouth and chewed while behind her Perry, pink-cheeked, straightened out her own clothes and pocketed the bottle of acetone.

“You two,” said Carmilla. “Seriously.”

“What?” Mattie asked, her mouth full of fudge.

Carmilla raised her eyebrow. “That's just downright unsettling.”

* * *

There wasn't a great deal of variety at the campus shop, but Laura filled up her baskets indiscriminately and quickly. She'd snuck in just before closing, and the bored student manning the desk dared her to take her time.

Last year's exile in the food desert of the Library and the privations on campus beforehand had ignited an new appreciation for salads, so she cleaned the crisper out of lettuces just in case they needed to stock up. And then ingredients to make rich and calorific dressings, because just because you were eating salads didn't mean they had to be dull. Some engineering was needed to balance this with the cookie supply long enough to get it all to the counter and into some large bags.

The campus was becoming grey and indistinct when she heaved her bags back to the house. 

There was somebody ahead of her in the half light. She was tall, her straight hair falling down her upright back. She walked dead ahead, her posture perfectly balanced. Her pace was slightly slower than Laura's despite her long legs and so the distance between them closed as the memorial appeared on the right.

Somehow there was something unpleasant about that back. The woman's t shirt was muddy, a dark stain in the grey light on her lower back. Her hair too – it was very familiar. But this was life on a university campus after all. With so many people passing through it was inevitable that some would start to look like each other and remind you of others. Finding yourself walking behind a woman who looked like Danny Lawrence was sure to happen sooner or later. And besides, they were probably only similar from behind.

As they reached the memorial and Laura was drawing close to her, she made a decision. Rather than have to match and then overtake the woman, she turned right onto the looping path that turned a wide circle around the memorial stone and took her back to the shop she'd come from. She could waste a few minutes that way and then go back home along an unoccupied path. It was all very silly and Carmilla would tease her if she found out, but it made her feel better and she wasn't really in a hurry.

After a couple of dozen steps she glanced back to confirm that the woman was disappearing into the distance. Instead she had turned and was following Laura down the looping path at a distance.

Her hair was loose and ragged and drifted forward over her face in places. With that, and in the grey light, her features were obscured but if it wasn't Danny Lawrence then it was her reflection. Laura stumbled in her step and then dragged her eyes frontward and hurried on.

She had turned the loop and was almost back to the shop where she could start out home again when curiosity got the better of her. Because it couldn't be Danny, therefore she was either mad or imagining it. There was a yellow light spilling out of the shopfront, so she looked over her shoulder.

She was two dozen paces behind, and advancing on Laura with no sign of recognition or even awareness. But it was her.

“Danny,” Laura whispered, stopping in her tracks. No reply, but Danny stopped as well, staring blankly at Laura.

Slowly, Laura took one step backwards, keeping her eyes fixed on her pursuer. Danny took one step forward.

She spun and hurried. First as a stumbling march, then as a jog and finally as a run. The bags of food swung in her hands and the straining plastic handles bit down on her fingers. She darted glances over her shoulder and always Danny was there, always the same distance behind.

She reached the door. Danny had neither gained on her nor fallen behind in her flight. Laura fumbled it open and slammed it closed, not looking to see how far up the path she had come. She sank down against the door in a rubble of food parcels, breathing heavily and waiting for the knock that never came.

“Laura?” Carmilla appeared at the top of the stairs. “Laura, what's up? Are you hurt?” She was by her side in an instant, patting her in search of a wound or a pain.

Laura scrunched her eyes shut and curled up in Carmilla's arms. “I'm not hurt,” she said. “It's Danny.”

“What? Laura, what?”

“She's outside.”

Carmilla drew back. She tilted Laura's chin up to look her very seriously in the eye. “All right,” she said carefully. “Let's not hurry. Go and sit on the stairs while I clear this up.” 

She didn't understand how Carmilla could be so calm. She watched her gather up the shopping and put it to one side before peering through the peephole.

“Ready?” she asked. Laura half-nodded, feeling the sick in her throat, and Carmilla opened the door.

There was, of course, nobody there.

“She's gone. She followed me all across campus and now she's gone.”

Carmilla closed the door and came to sit next to her.

“Why won't she stay dead?” Laura asked, and then the words caught up with her. “Oh God, that's not what I meant! I just- not like this, not like this.”

Carmilla tugged her chin up to look her in the eyes. “Laura, she wasn't there.”

“She was! She was just gone by the time you opened the door, and-”

“No. Laura. I was watching from our bedroom window when you came running down the path. That's why I came down, I couldn't understand why you were running. There was nobody but you.”

Laura stared at her in growing panic. Nobody? But then, “You think I'm going mad. Am I going mad?”

“Oh, come on,” said Carmilla, exasperated. “Cupcake. You are ridiculous. And a creature of extremes. You had a funny turn, a bit of a daydream come to life. It happens.”

* * *

Lola's piece of embroidery was beginning to take form. Leaves and flowers were weaving their way out from the corner in which she'd started and the central figure of a tree could now be outlined. She toyed between the different shades of green for the leaves. Probably two complementary shades would work best.

A glass of wine materialised on the table next to her and she reluctantly accepted that the decision would be best left to the morning. Off the pile of cloth and twine went to the coffee table, and she curled her legs up on her side of the sofa as Mattie sat down on the other. LaFontaine was off somewhere and had taken several boxes with them. Laura and Carmilla were upstairs – apparently she wasn't feeling well, and Lola had a worrying suspicion that maybe the large saucepan hadn't been as thoroughly disinfected as it could have been.

It wasn't entirely clear to Lola how Mattie managed to keep her outfits to spotlessly presentable. It was difficult to imagine her ironing or pressing or any such domestic task, and yet tonight's short and delicate dress was utterly creaseless. Possibly there was some ancient secret to it, and she resolved to ask one of these days. But not tonight, because that would draw attention to the fact that she'd been admiring the cut of the burgundy silk.

And besides, it would invite comparison with her own less elegant appearance. She'd got flour on her jeans and one of the arguably superfluous ruffles on her blouse was half-loose. But then she wasn't here to compete with Mattie, for all that it suddenly seemed a pity that she hadn't got changed after baking.

It was Mattie's turn to tell a story tonight. Lola was not sure how accurate all her accounts of the past were, but she was a good storyteller all the same.

In Venice, which was the city of mirrors both in the fine glassware shops and also in the doubled city reflected in the canals below, there was a woman who conceived herself to be sinful. This was not entirely unheard of, even in a city so devoted to pleasure as the Most Serene Republic, but there was an edge to this woman's belief which attracted the attention of curiosity spotters. Her mania was that she was not the original Signorina Roberta Mazzini at all, but that the true Signorina had been a creature of such surpassing purity and virtue that she had been lifted to heaven at the very instant of her first Communion. However, this having occurred at the very special and unusual favour of God Himself, the normal channels of redemption had been bypassed and the originally sinful nature of the frail flesh had not received the normal forgiveness and atonement that the the sacrament of Reconciliation would have conveyed. This shadow of the immaculate Roberta Mazzini was therefore left behind at the moment of her soul's ascension, to trouble the serenity of Venice.

That this was patent nonsense was obvious to the long string of priests sent to reason with Signorina Mazzini, but to no avail. And so she was left to bewail her fate until one night she was walking alone and came across a strange woman out late herself and lurking in the depths of an alley. This woman appeared charmed by the beauty of Signorina Mazzini and was even so bold as to kiss her neck when the torrent of prayers and apologies for her unworthiness coming from Roberta's mouth aroused her curiosity and they fell to talking.

Signora Belmonde listened to the tale with great interest - and much amusement at the descriptions of the foolish priests who would not believe her. And she took Roberta's shadow to a high place in her apartment overlooking the Grand Canal and there showed her the interplay of light and darkness that was the sky above and the sky below in the water. She told Roberta that she had collected shadows these many centuries and that, if Roberta was willing, she would take to herself the frail shade that she was, extinguish it, and allow the balance of the city to be restored.

The lady Belmonde's manner was so courteous, and her lips so gentle when they touched her, and the offer so exactly what she wanted herself, that Roberta consented at once. And so the bodily life of Signorina Roberta Mazzini ended on a rooftop suspended between heaven and earth and her shadow was eaten by another.

Lola was silent at the completion of this telling. She watched Mattie retrieve her glass – wine, at the moment, not blood – and relieve her throat.

“So you killed her.”

“Obviously. She was rather excited by the prospect of self obliteration, if it's any comfort.”

“But you killed her. And drank her blood.”

Mattie put down the glass firmly and cocked her head. “Lola, are you surprised?”

She shouldn't be, Lola knew. And actually she wasn't surprised. Surprise didn't enter into it. Shock rather, and horror. Naturally she'd seen Mattie drinking blood – and come to think of it, she'd seen her smeared with other people's blood before, even if only on Laura's videos from the time she had no direct memories of.

And it had been very scary, but then after a while she'd got used to Mattie.

She felt sick. “Of course,” she said carefully. “You must have killed, what, thousands of people in your life?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And I'm here drinking wine with you. How can I do that? Heavens, how can I do that?”

Mattie's face had let the smile fade and gave no answer. “I don't know, Lola. How can you?”

She got up, so suddenly it was almost a surprise to herself. “I can't be here,” she said. “I can't. This isn't me.”

“Lola-”

“Don't _Lola_ me!” She batted away Mattie's hand and didn't feel danger. “This is nonsense. You and your pouts and your lipstick and _Lola_ this and _Lola_ that – it's callous and it's cruel! You don't give a damn about the people you eat, so why the hell should you about me? Can't you just _not_?”

Mattie's face closed up entirely. “I have never lied about what I am,” she said. “You have always known it, even if you preferred to ignore it.” 

There was a knot of fury inside Lola's chest. She could feel it, roaring to come out. She clamped her mouth shut to speak as deliberately as she could. “How dare you? How dare you act like this is some game where I just have to get over-”

“ _I_ dare, little girl? Don't forget who you're talking to. I could snap you like a twig.”

“Like you do everyone else, right? Because it's all threats now that I'm not smiling and bending over backwards to accommodate you?” The words came out of her, as cutting as she could make them. “A thousand years and what you really want is an audience, someone to react to you-”

“What gives you – some _chit_ of a _mayfly_ of a _corn doll_ of a girl - the right to talk to me like-”

It was out before she had even understood what she meant. “Because I'm the only one who _will_!”

Matska stood up. Lola watched the predatory tension in her shoulders and the way her whole body stood poised. “I've heard enough. Don't think you're a player in this, Perry. Don't think you're an equal.” She was gone, turning on her heel and disappearing into the hallway.


	8. War and Peace

Carmilla surfaced from dreams of scrambling up crumbling walls of soil to lie gasping for air on the bank of her bed. She took a while to steady herself, patting at the mattress and the pillows and at Laura still asleep next to her. The lightening before dawn was already starting through the thin curtains, but since this was summer it was still far too early for her tastes. Briefly she contemplated waking Laura up in the customary pleasant and enjoyable fashion, but since she'd worn herself out last night alternately stressing and crying over Danny being both dead and somehow not dead enough, that was an activity better left for another time.

So Carmilla let Laura rest and carefully extricated herself from the tangle of sheets. Collecting her book, she shuffled downstairs as quietly as possible. She knew from long experience that there are certain dreams she should not tempt to extend themselves, and those included anything starting in a coffin below the earth and ending in the turmoil of an Austrian battle. Three sleepless hours catching up on her Kleist would be a better choice.

The living room looked subtly wrong when she entered it, but she didn't catch up with what her subconscious had noticed until she was about to sit down. There were two wineglasses abandoned on two tables, both hardly drunk. And Perry's embroidery was lying on the sofa, which meant that one of those dirty abandoned glasses belonged to a woman normally in the habit of apologising for there being mud on the bootscraper.

So one of two things had apparently happened last night. Possibly Raggedy Anne had snapped and given Mattie a near-suicidal talking to followed by the two abandoning their drinks – in which case LaFontaine owed Carmilla twenty euros, because they'd placed their own bet on the inevitable explosion not happening until the second half of the month. Or alternatively it was Mattie who had snapped and ravished the curly one at unexpectedly short notice – in which case Laura owed Carmilla fifty euros, the cupcake having seen fewer sides of Matska Belmonde and therefore having found Carmilla's suggestion inherently implausible.

Carmilla did not sit down at once but instead wandered around the room, looking at the remnants of last night and thinking. Outside was not black any more but it was still dark enough that her refection in the window stood out more clearly than the actual scene of the campus in the early morning. She toyed with the grooming possibilities – fringe or no fringe? - but none had any hope whatsoever with her pillow-scattered and unwashed hair.

She turned away, and then turned back curiously. The window was a very imperfect mirror, but she was sure there had been some short subdued movement just as she moved on. Behind her? Or outside, flitting past? She met her own eyes and held the gaze until sure of the natural stillness. Nothing moved. But slowly, very slowly, she became aware that there was somebody behind her.

They had not moved into frame, they had not approached or slid across the surface of the glass. They were simply there as if they had been there all along waiting for Carmilla to notice them. She raised her eyes cautiously and met those others over her shoulder. The girl's features, tremulous in the vague reflection, took a while to assemble themselves into a legible face.

There was ice around her heart as Ell's mouth quirked in a smile of recognition. Carefully Carmilla reached out behind her, not letting her eyes leave Ell's for a moment, and waved her arm around the space where she should be. Her hand met nothing but air. Then dropping her gaze for a moment she tried to see if the face was actually a warped image from outside. But the pale blonde hair and the paler white skin floated very clearly on the surface of the glass as if the window reflected more than was in the room.

And as Carmilla watched Ell's smile faded. Her eyes hardened, her lip curled, and she turned her head away. She had seen that exact motion before: Ell going away to her unknown fate, hating her. Carmilla shut her eyes and hoped it would not be there when she opened them. She thought about Laura, and the way she would stand on tiptoes to prop her chin on her shoulder. Not a phantom image but a real, warm body.

“What's up, sis?” 

Carmilla spun to see Mattie enter the room, and tried to gesture at the glass. But she could see even before opening her mouth that it was only the faint reflection of her own face again. She steadied herself, reminded that she had a heartbeat these days and her sister could no doubt hear it pounding at an enormous rate.

“Nothing, nothing. Though I saw something, is all.” Mattie's face displayed skepticism, so she added, “What are you doing up so early? Haven't you got a night of being the terror of the forest to sleep off? Unless you maybe called that off for some reason.” She let the hint stand.

Mattie ignored it and brushed off her suit with a dismissive action. “I'm heading out. There's somebody I need to see in Graz – so it's business before the dubious pleasure of breakfast with the girls and person.” She hoisted her briefcase.

Carmilla tried to take an interest in her sister's hobbies, but financial dealings made her head melt. “Sounds exciting,” was about as much as she could manage.

“Not to you. I, on the other hand, have been just _waiting_ for an excuse to feed this banker his spleen even before he short-sold on my portfolio when he thought I was dead.” She shivered in joyful anticipation.

“Surprised you let him live this long.”

“Oh, you know,” she declared. “Got to leave some alive today or there'll be nobody to do business with tomorrow. It's like financial permaculture, for sustainable harvesting. Besides, his earlier peccadilloes were never _quite_ bad enough for a truly entertaining punishment. He's going to have the most delicious shock when he finds me waiting in his office.”

Carmilla found herself grinning despite her recently troubled conscience on the matter of vampirism. “What would you do without enemies, Mattie?”

“Get bored, clearly.” She matched Carmilla's grin. “A bit of struggle gets a girl's blood flowing first thing in the morning. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” and she mimed taking her non-existent pulse.

“Not bringing any company on your tour of slaughtering the Austrian financial establishment?” Carmilla asked innocently, peeping up at Mattie's expression as it darkened.

“The banker's already getting disembowled,” said Mattie, cold seeping into her voice. “I wouldn't be so cruel as to inflict that... impertinent, infuriating, _cutesy_ ginger moppet on him as well.”

Twenty euros then. Although...

“And there you were saying you liked a bit of antagonism,” Carmilla smirked.

“That's different,” she huffed.

“Is it now.”

“Of course.” She straightened herself out and picked up her briefcase. “Anyway, my taxi will be here soon. Behave yourself.” She flicked Carmilla's nose and turned to go.

“Get me some nice chocolate. Oh Mattie, one thing? Remember that you were the one to bring Raggedy Anne up when I mentioned company. Not me.” Mattie looked back at her with fiery eyes, but Carmilla just smiled innocently and said, “Off you go and restore your empire. I know you like a good fight.”

* * *

It was half past nine and Lola was trying and failing to go down to breakfast. The expectation that she would have to see Matska Belmonde's face weighed on her. It was not a face she wanted sneering at her, or mocking her, or indeed doing anything else around her – which was inconvenient because her her subconscious seemed to be stuck on images of it. 

She wondered how she had stood the pressure these last few weeks and why it had somehow stopped feeling like pressure after a while. Probably her own sheet relief over not being eaten, or maybe something to do with the way Mattie's expression changed constantly not giving her a chance to get properly annoyed. And the way she so precisely lined her eyes meant she could look indecently innocent when she wanted.

With an effort Lola brought her focus back onto the problem at hand and concluded that she would have to face the others because not going down would look like weakness and produce snide remarks. Worse, somebody might come looking for her concerned and wanting to talk about it. That would be even more disconcerting, since she really didn't know what she could say in the circumstances. 

_I had an argument with Mattie,_ she would tell LaFontaine.

_Perr, you've been arguing with Belmonde since she turned up_ , LaFontaine would point out. _And we're not even talking about last year. Hell, you tried to kill her once - which I've got to say was impressively hardcore._

And then Lola would have to say, _but it's been different recently_. And then horribly, excruciatingly, she'd need to add, _and it was nice and I wanted it to continue._

At which point LaFontaine would go and get their frankly alarming collection of straightjackets and containment devices and tell her very carefully that enjoying the company of the thousand year old killing machine was grounds for committal in a secure institution. 

Lola's accepted her feverish imaginings might be a touch on the dramatic side, but surely the gist of it was in the right direction. So to avoid this embarrassing situation and for no other reason - and certainly not in the vain hope that Mattie might be there looking sorry and apologetic - Lola went down, watching her bare feet stand perfectly in the middle of the steps to avoid the temptation of peeping prematurely through the bannisters. 

She observed the insides of her head as disappointment collided with relief – there was no Mattie at the table. What there was instead was an atmosphere of brooding. Laura sat eating her distressingly brightly coloured cereal with ferocious intent. Carmilla had shifted her chair so close by her girlfriend that they were practically sitting on top of each other. LaFontaine hardly looked up from their notes they had taken to bringing to breakfast. Alchemical symbols with barely anything legible covered the paper, as did milk spots they hadn't bothered to dab dry.

“No Mattie?” Lola asked, trying to keep her voice light.

“Went off early,” said Carmilla. “Was up at five this morning ranting. 'Impertinent, infuriating, cutesy ginger moppet'. Ideas, Miss Curly?”

“We may have had a disagreement,” Lola confessed. She shot nervous looks at Laura and LaFontaine in case searching questions were forthcoming about her life and the people in it to have disagreements with, but they were barely listening.

“You don't say. Well, I haven't seen her this mad since you tried to kill her.” Carmilla looked mildly impressed. “You do get under her skin, Raggedy Anne.”

“I'm sure the feeling's mutual,” she muttered, and focused on arranging herself a cup of tea.

“Not many people do, you know,” Carmilla went on. “Mattie acts irate a lot of the time to get her way, but she really doesn't care less what games most people get up to so long as they don't genuinely threaten her.”

Lola had nothing to say to this, but found it a plausibly arrogant character trait. It would be easy to be as charming as Mattie if you didn't really have a stake in the world.

“What are we doing today, LaFontaine?” she asked to change the subject entirely.

“Hmm?” They dragged their gaze away from a diagram that looked unpleasantly like a Vitruvian Man gone wrong. “Today?”

“Research, LaF. I'm feeling productive!” She smiled, and hoped it looked enthusiastic rather than brittle. “Are we any closer to devising a spell that won't go poking Inanna in the mind's eye?”

“There are some angles to explore.” They shuffled their position, and Lola was suddenly put in mind of how they used to behave when a teacher questioned them on whether they'd done their homework. “But we've got to be careful. We've dragged a god out of your brain once before Perr, I don't want to have to do it again. Anyway, there's time.”

“What _time_?” Laura spoke for the first time. “Time to do what?” There was an edge to her voice that Lola did not like in the slightest. It had overtones of the time before.

“To, you know. Gather materials, and play about with-”

“This isn't fun, LaF. We've been screwing around. Playing with poetry,” and Carmilla flinched as it she'd been pinched, “or going all Aleister Crowley,” LaFontaine lowered their eyes, “or trying to act like ignoring it means it'll go away.” Lola clutched her hands together under the table. “Well, this isn't some cute mystery about legends and playing cards anymore. Things are happening. Danny's not dead. We need to do something.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Danny's not dead. She followed me back here last night. Who next? Want to see Vordenberg again? Or Theo? Or Will?” She picked up her spoon, toyed with it, and dropped it back into her bowl with a clink. “Come on. Finish up and we're going to the Library.” She shoved her chair back and stamped out, Carmilla hurrying after her with a reproachful glance at LaFontaine.

“So that's-” Lola began.

“Yeah.”

“Do you kn-”

“No.”

“Could she be-”

“Dunno.”

“Fine.” She sighed heavily and patted LaFontaine's hand. “How's it going, anyway? I've hardly spoken to you these past couple of days.”

“Yeah, I know.” They shrugged, looking mildly shamefaced. “It's been busy. I'm kind of stuck, to tell you the truth. You been keeping all right, control freak?” The nickname felt a little forced, as if they had consciously included it to make up for a previous lack. But Lola kept that to herself.

“I'm okay, weirdo. Been on edge a bit. I'm snapping at people a lot,” she confessed.

“You'd have to be mad not to snap at Belmonde.”

“Well, true. She's... enraging. Just so annoying. It's the way she doesn't look _ruffled_ by anything, she just swans around like she's at a cocktail party or something, all groomed and-” she ran out of breath.

“And pause, Perr. I get it.” They screwed up their forehead. “You're not getting worried that being angry at Belmonde might connect to the Inanna-Ereshkigal beef? I mean, you were damn furious at her when you got all possessed. And rage is one of Inanna's traits.”

That was a horrible thought. “I... wasn't. But I am _now_! Why would you say that?”

“Ah. Well, it's likely spurious. Just Belmonde being Belmonde then, and causing the equal and opposite reaction you, as is natural. Come on, let's get packed up for the Library.”

* * *

“So what is all this stuff?” Lola asked. They were standing in one of the rooms LaFontaine had used as a laboratory during their exile in the Library. The place was just as it had been left the previous year, the Library having been unmotivated to clean itself up. Apparently it didn't conceptualise order and chaos in the same way Lola did, which she was fairly sure was LaFontaine's way of trying to persuade her that the sentient book nook wasn't actively an accursed force of untidiness.

“Materials, mostly. Last thing I was doing here was making injectable nanobots to reconfigure your neurons. I had to make a lot of quite complicated tools in order to make the really complicated tools I needed to make the bots.”

So that was nice to know, Lola thought. All the sharp metal and pointy glass was directed with her in mind.

Carmilla put her arms around Laura, who looked mildly less frantic after an uneventful walk through the campus. “Okay, cupcake,” she said. “We're in the Library. What was the next item on the list?”

“Not sure. I was hoping we might find a pair of glasses and writing scribbled on the wall. Or maybe,” she raised her voice, “maybe the Library might have some _information_ for us. Maybe it's keen to _help out_.”

There was silence from the sentient building.

“I tried the door downstairs,” LaFontaine said. “It just opens into hallways. No cyberpunk dystopia today.”

“You don't think it's... I don't know, dead or something?” Lola asked. In the quiet that followed, there was a distant grinding and moaning, which subsided into the hush that preceded it.

“Nope, it's alive and well. But I guess we're not priority right now.” They slung their laptop bag off their shoulder and set it up on the table, along with another thin piece of electronics which turned out to be a portable scanner. “I'm thinking since we're here we can scan some of the books, maybe get some text recognition going so we can put them on a search algorithm.”

Carmilla hefted a couple of familiar volumes from under the table. “Would be easier with the bookboy here to read everything for us.”

LaFontaine bit their lip. “Yeah. Don't touch that!” they added sharply to Laura poking at a plastic box on one of the workbenches. 

“Why not?”

“That's, um, the thing that turned out not to be a talisman after all. Like, straight out of the ground.” Laura pulled her hand back as if the box containing Vordenberg's graverobbed heart was red-hot. 

She shuffled as far away from it as possible and fiddled about with the computer to keep her eyes from sliding over. “What's this?” she asked, tabbing to an already open window. One of her videos sparked into life and Lola watched her own face being operated by the Dean. She had seen it before but only once, and it threw her insides into turmoil.

_But you've given yourself away, Enki,_ said the Dean, moving Lola's lips, while behind her Theo threw up noisily. _You don't have the power to have done this alone. You still have a high priest. And if I can't use Carmilla to open the Sixth Seal then we'll just have to see if that meddling little clerk of yours will don't, won't we?_

Abruptly LaFontaine leaned across and closed the video. “And we don't need to see that. Sorry, Perr.” Lola nodded, grateful that the image of something else staring out of her eyes was gone.

“Why were-”

“Doesn't matter.”

Lola decided that now was the appropriate time to apply some kind of distraction for her best friend's sake and to avoid any more unpleasant looks at her own face. “What's the gunky metal glass thing with the battery?”

“Electroplating!” LaFontaine said, with a look of gratitude. They untangled the wires and demonstrated their toy. “For plating some of the nanobot injector components with silver. See, you have a solution of metal salts and run a current through whatever you want to plate. The ions carry the current through the solution and attach themselves to the anode or the cathode. That one's the cathode, plated with silver. And the horrible one is the anode, covered in nitratey ick.”

“Can't you have the nice shiny one without the horrible messy one?” Lola wanted to know.

“No, Perr. You've got to have the positive ions moving in one direction and the negative ions in the other. Need both an anode and a cathode in the system.” They selected a ladder leaning against one of the the shelves and attempted to retrieve a book from a mildly inaccessible shelf.

“Huh.” Carmilla poked the stick of tarnished copper that was the cathode with a fingernail and watched bit of the patina flake off. “Well, at least it's philosophically apt.” She poked Laura, who was still looking a bit mortified to have found the box of heart.

“And for those of us not used to deciphering your endless allusions?” Lola asked. 

Carmilla sighed. “Anode and Cathode – so I'm not the science nerd here, but the names are Greek. An-odos and Kath-odos. The way up, and the way down. Well that was Heraclitus – _The way up and the way down are one and the same._ And like LaF says, they depend on each other so they're sort of the same, right?” She caught their expressions. “Look, it's less clever and impressive if I have to explain it.”

“Karnstein.” Lola looked at LaFontaine. They had paused halfway up a ladder and were holding a book as if frozen in place. “Say that again.” They recovered their power of movement and slid down to the ground.

“The way up and the way down,” she said, looking pressurised. “Like, the same. Bit of Heraclitus, that's all.”

“Heraclitus. Tell me.” LaFontaine was entering focus. They sat down at the table and stared fixedly at the point between their two hands. Lola had seen this before, and she knew the others must have done so too last year. This was what happened when enough questions had been added to their brain that they started spilling over into answers.

“Uh.” Carmilla rapidly recited the brief notes version. “Fifth and sixth century BC Greek philosopher, from Ephesus. Most of his work survives only in fragments, which are... obscure, at the best of times. He taught a _logos_ , a unifying principle in nature manifesting in the unity of all opposites-”

“That. Go on.”

Carmilla wound the words out of her memory. “So – _the way up and the way down are one and the same._ And then another time, _The God: day and night, winter and summer, war and peace-_ ”

“Damn it!” LaFontaine. “I heard it! You said it, Hollis, and I didn't _listen_!”

Laura shot a worried glance at Carmilla as they watched LaFontaine grab the laptop and bash away at the keys.

“ _They will not understand how a thing agrees with its opposite,_ ” Carmilla said quietly. “ _It is a harmony bending back in on itself like a bow or a lyre._ ”

“Got it!” LaFontaine pressed play, and one of Laura's videos sprang to life on the screen. 

“ _Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld,_ ” Laura's recorded voice said, considering the best options for summoning a deity for aid, “ _I'm thinking she's out best bet. She's like the Dean's sister or reflection or both-_ ” 

LaFontaine stopped playback. “That's it. That's what I should have listened to. All that searching your videos for clues about Inanna but you were solving our puzzle right there under my nose. And I should have listened to you telling me gods were more complicated than that. High five, Karnstein!” they declared sharply, and Carmilla recoiled from the sudden slap.

“In the Descent of Inanna myth,” she said slowly, rubbing her stinging hand, “Inanna is hung on a hook and when her servants come down, Ereshkigal is groaning in pain.” LaFontaine nodded, grinning wider.

“Well, I'm lost,” Laura said. “Anyone else lost?” She looked at Lola, who nodded. She was very much lost. She was also feeling an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of her stomach, the sensation that used to grow when at school a teacher would pick her out to say something to the class. She felt found out, but could not fathom why.

LaFontaine was already sketching on the first piece of paper that came to hand. “We poked Ereshkigal when she had a connection to Belmonde,” they said, “And Inanna came and got all shouty. We all assumed that was because our spell had attracted attention, but what if it wasn't? Inanna and Ereshkigal are linked _themselves_. They... well I don't know the details, but the problem wasn't what we _did_. The problem was that we tried to shove Death Lady out the front door and left the back door unguarded.”

“So, what we need to do is double-” Carmilla started, but they were already talking over her.

“Double the spell, do it to Belmonde and Perr at the same time, push them both away. Inanna back to the Great Above, Ereshkigal back to the Great Below. Get in!”

* * *

Lola traipsed back to the house that afternoon, leaving LaFontaine and the others to their hurried reconfiguring of spells. The thought of playing one half of a pair of spell targets for LaFontaine's rapidly advancing magic analysis machine made her slightly sick, but this objection had been waved aside. There was a god to send away with her tail between her legs, which trumped more local considerations. She had suggested that maybe it wasn't worth bothering with because Inanna hadn't bothered her at all since the incident in the garden back home, but Laura was convinced that the beginnings of something big were just starting to stir. 

She found a leather briefcase left abandoned in the living room when she looked in, but no Mattie. Probably washing the blood of whoever the most recent victim had been off her hands. Lola naturally couldn't care less about what Ms Belmonde got up to, and to prove how entirely unperturbed she was she sat down right next to the bag in case she came back into the room.

It was quite ridiculous, she thought as she took up her previously abandoned embroidery, to be getting this worked up. This was hardly the most unpleasant time she'd had at Silas and she would get through the inevitable resumption of petty sniping from a fashion plate just as she had got through the fairy queen and the vampire cult and the possessions and that awful exam on the German Romantics in her second year. And then LaFontaine would come up with some unpleasant but effective magic to keep the ancient bloodthirsty gods away and Mattie would sidle off to be elegant in Morocco and Lola would never have to see her again.

Which was a _good_ thing, and not at all the occasion for her to feel slightly downcast at the prospect. She decided that was most likely the Silas surroundings talking. She felt bored and cooped up here in the shabby guest house, so it was unsurprising she'd found herself spending evenings with whatever company presented itself and laughing at a vampire's jokes. Laura and Carmilla spent a lot of time alone together and LaFontaine was in full work mode, so really the preceding days in the only company available were the inevitable result and therefore insignificant.

Perfectly normal. No inexplicable stirrings in the region of her chest. No sense that she had been on the threshold of something terrible and awful and violent and – _something_ \- and then had the door slammed in her face.

But then being on the verge of something before having the door slammed was something she had got used to over the years, so even if she _did_ feel like that, it was just the background hum to being ordinary, predictable Lola Perry.

She tried to think about Inanna and Ereshkigal instead. She searched though her head, poking at thoughts to see if Inanna was hiding behind a memory or a fantasy, but any connection to the goddess appeared as dormant as it had been for these past weeks. She felt maybe, just maybe, there was a downside to that. If there had been a silver lining to the garden incident, it was watching Matska Belmonde falling to the ground in front of her. She could do with a bit more of that kind of power and triumph in her life. A bit of imposing order on the messy world that always defied her hopes.

Eventually after having made no progress at all on the embroidery she gave up on the living room. It was too empty. Upstairs she found her cards and sat on the bed leafing through them. They did everything in that little picture universe. They were born, grew, loved, fought, died, were reborn. Thievery, kindness, anger, rest, work: everything contrasted with everything else like the bright colours and the sharp clear lines of the artwork. Unlike the pallor of the never up to standard world.

The sound of Carmilla and Laura coming in below recalled her to herself, and she noticed that she hadn't been thinking like that a couple of days before - not all this anger and the sudden need to get control of her life. She breathed out.

Experimentally she arranged the cards on her bed. She moved some of the nicer ones to one side, and put the nastier cards with swords and sorrow on the other. Ones suggesting peace and rest closest to her, and ones with action and excitement at the far end. She absorbed herself in the construction of a perfect circle, everything next to its affinities and as far away as possible from its opposites. She couldn't find Two of Pentacles, which was troubling.

This ordered pattern pleased her for a few minutes until she started looking closer. Certainly the Moon and the Sun should be opposites – but the Moon card showed the titular body rising about two towers, and those towers appeared again in the Death card, but with the sun rising behind them. And then there was Death's white rose, which was carried also by the Fool, surely the most different card. The whole web of images kept connecting things that should be separate.

She leaned back against her pillows and felt something behind it. Hidden between the two pillows was a book she had not placed there herself. 

_The Collected Poetry of William Blake_ , an old edition, foxed and worn. She could guess who had left it there.

It fell open into her lap to reveal the missing Two of Pentacles marking a page headed _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell._

She scanned down the unfamiliar lines and bits and pieces of odd rambling phrases with disjointed capitalisation jumped out at her:

_As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity..._

_Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence._

_The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white._

And, so silly that it made her laugh out loud, the rambling passage of angels and devils morphing into each other until _Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil is my particular friend and we often read the Bible together in its infernal sense._

It was all right for him, Lola supposed. Doing it the other way round seemed more difficult. Then she remembered that she wasn't supposed to be doing it any way round at all and she stopped laughing entirely.

Finally there was one smudged line under which the paper was gently marked in pencil. There was no way to know that Mattie had done it rather than anyone else, but Lola took it that she had when she read:

_Opposition is true friendship._

It wasn't an apology. Not even close. But from Matska Belmonde, constitutionally incapable of backing down even over a cereal packet, it was something unexpected.

* * *

It was irrelevant, she decided at twenty minutes past five. This wasn't a matter of different tastes or temperaments. Matska Belmonde was a cold blooded killer who had slaughtered thousands in her life and nothing would change this. How could she be accepting of that?

_I don't know, Lola,_ said yesterday's voice in her ear, _how can you?_

It was twenty-five minutes past before she remembered that she had driven a stake through Mattie's brother and collapsed him into a bundle of limbs. She was a killer too.

* * *

It was so easy, she decided at a quarter to six. She didn't have to react. Mattie could just be Mattie and she wasn't going to change so Lola might as well accept it and enjoy the back and forth.

_Lola, you have got to stop taking this kind of thing to heart,_ Mattie ticked her off indulgently from two and a half weeks before and that seemed good advice right now.

* * *

It was terrible advice and completely impossible, she decided at five minutes past six. A complete contradiction in terms. If Mattie couldn't help being what she was, then neither could Lola. That would be equally wrong. And why should she just accept it? The world had walked over Lola Perry quite enough at this point in her life.

_Maybe I'm just going to continue and tell off the tenth-century vampire, because my life can't get any weirder_ , her own voice echoed back at her.

But there was no way Matska Belmonde would let her get away with such resistance. How could she?

_I don't know. How can you?_

At ten minutes past six, she had firmly decided on a course of action. She could have foreseen this choice from the beginning, it was so predictable.

Like everything Lola Perry did.

At twenty past six-

* * *

She didn't knock when she came in at half past eight – Mattie would have known it was her from halfway down the corridor anyway. She was sitting in the decrepit armchair, facing the door and apparently doing nothing at all when Lola came in. Her eyes followed, but she said nothing.

“Um,” Lola started, “so I wanted to say something.”

There was a slow nod but Mattie still kept her lips sealed, so Lola sat down on the bed and drew her knees up to her chest. This was difficult, because she scarcely knew what she was going to say herself.

“The Rabbi at my Bat Mitzvah talked about how there was no shame in being humble and predictable,” she began. “Which was a great thing to hear when you're twelve, believe me. I was so embarrassed. Lola Perry: humble, predictable, maker of reasonably good French toast.” She paused. “Then the rabbi said that when HaShem created, it was by division of what was without form. The light from the darkness, and the waters above from the waters below, and the sea from the land and so on. Birds and fish and different animals, all by dividing out. Everything different, everything necessary.

“And then he talked about how the Prophet Isaiah had told us to hope for the day when the lion will lie down with the lamb.” She made a face and repeated the rabbi's words. “ _So let us not be in such a hurry to praise the lions that we scorn the lambs – they are as equal partners in the eyes of the One who made them_. I knew which one I was supposed to be. So did everyone else.”

Mattie's dark eyes watched her. Lola tucked her chin on top of her knees and kept going. This was the difficult bit, which had wavered in her mind between profound and ridiculously fortune-cookie in the thoughtful hour before she came round.

“I suppose... what I'm asking is whether the lion _can_ lie down with the lamb. Unless the lamb can hunt with – oh gosh, this is so silly.” She hid her face in her knees and waited to be mocked like the presumptuous and insubstantial girl she was.

There was movement from Mattie's chair. She shifted, and there was something like a growl or a purr or a murmur of agreement. “I remember the lions,” she said, “when I was a girl living in a grass hut by the river - more than a thousand years ago. They are proud animals when they look at you. You think that they will never give themselves up to another or acknowledge any bond that is not reciprocal.”

Wonder. “You do understand.”

Mattie waited for Lola to say more, but when it was clear there was nothing else she continued. “When I was first raised up by Mother, she let me have my time alone for a while. Brought me up from the grave, told me what I was, and then told me where to meet her.” She met Lola's look. “I killed my whole village for what they'd done to me and then I went out following the river. I hunted one of the lions. That was the start of my new life after disposing of the old one. For my people, hunting lions had been a high-status affair. Only men were allowed to do it, and only at certain special times. But I killed one with my own hands, a solitary male, and I broke through his ribs to eat his heart.

“When I woke up, there were flies crawling all over the carcass, and birds had come to eat them. Bright, colourful flitting little things - bee-eaters. Do you know them? Little jewels of birds, made of coloured silk. I was so fast, I caught one. And I held that delicious little thing in my hand, and I was about to crush it when I realised I didn't have to. I knew that I could, so I didn't have to. Do you understand?” 

Lola thought on it and nodded slowly. She drew a breath. “I think you're wicked. I think you're callous and cruel and bloodthirsty. I think you would stop hunting people if you had any shred of compassion at all and I will never stop saying so.” She held out her hand, palm up.

“You are ridiculous. And entirely too tightly-wound and probably half mad,” Mattie said. She placed her own hand on top of Lola's, palm down. “And you are fatally compromised, Lola.” It wasn't an insult, simply a statement.

And she was, Lola realised. She had done a monstrous thing and all she felt was a sort of deep satisfaction at the dimension she had revealed in herself. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”

They sat together, not saying anything, and Lola learned the texture of Mattie's palm on hers. She couldn't tell, not even by attending very carefully, whether her hand was still or stroking with the smallest movements possible. Inside her head, she had stepped out into a black void and found to her inexpressible surprise that the endless fall had taken her to the top of a mountain, to where the views were enormous, and terrifying, and beautiful.

“I'm not apologising,” she said before she slipped out. “For what I said last night.”

“Nor am I,” said Mattie. “And so that you know, I killed a man who stole from me today and I won't apologise for that either.” Lola waited for the horror to rise up her throat, but nothing came. Mattie shifted around in a way that suggested ruffling feathers. “Although in the matter of last night's words specifically, I may be prepared to concede minor unintentional inaccuracies in reporting.”

Lola knew she probably shouldn't push the public relations jargon for something more specific, but the temptation was too strong. “Such as...”

The look Mattie gave was as violent as could be imagined, but Lola just smiled innocently until she composed her features into her best spokeswoman guise. “It may have been suggested that you were not a equal contender in this game. This was, of course, a statement to be interpreted strictly to refer to your...” she slowed down, constructing the revisionary sentence one word at a time, “differing arrangement of qualities, Lola.”

“Coexistence?”

“Better than a fight to the death. Generally speaking.”


	9. The Way Up and the Way Down

The Tief Urwald was not a place to stray too deep into and even Mattie thought it best to stick to the one path known to reliably remain in the same place. Here on the boundary between the wood and the meadows bordering the campus the best of both worlds burst into life. The burgeoning undergrowth of flowers and tendrils spilled over the path, occasionally moving of its own accord and having to be slapped down gently but firmly. There were butterflies, so deep purple they were practically black, and birds with red eyes that watched with more intelligence than was usual in starlings.

The strangest thing was Mattie. She had proposed a walk that morning and Lola had accepted without hesitation, only realising a little later that Mattie was never prone to suggesting anything. Typically she was an expert in turning up in places, insinuating herself into whatever was going on with an air of being part of the natural environment. She didn't extend invitations so much as bend the world so that everything came towards her. But she had asked Lola with the slightly stiff politeness she had worn since making up their quarrel, and then when they were crossing onto the woodland trail she had held out her arm and Lola had taken it.

They talked about Lola. That was not so odd. Mattie absorbed stories about people. Lola supposed that this was one of her skills occupying the overlap between socialite and monster. She could just see her in her mind's eye in a cocktail dress, drifting across a crowded room and picking up blackmail material here, a moment of weakness there. This probably meant that she should be circumspect about her own life, but the interior warning went unheeded when Mattie asked about her week in Valletta two years ago, and whether Lola preferred German wine to French, and which theatre in Frankfurt was the best.

“Shouldn't you have tired of the details of mortal life by now?” she asked, as Mattie was agreeing to the quality of the _aperol spritz_ in the Upper Barrakka Gardens, but recommending Lola try a little bar just by the cathedral.

Her response was rhetorical “Why? I like humans.”

“You eat humans,” Lola reminded her. “You crush them beneath your designer heels. You express contempt for them on average twenty-seven times a day. I counted yesterday,” she informed her primly.

“You are confusing liking someone with fellow-feeling, darling. You have no mercy or camaraderie to those splendid rose bushes in your garden, am I right? Cut and prune and rage at them when they develop a fondness for rosefly. But what lovely blossoms the ones you let live are.”

“A charming vantage point you immortals have.”

“ _Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the other's death, dying the other's life._ Your mad scientist's new favourite philosopher Heraclitus,” explained Mattie at Lola's expression, “What? Sis can't have all the good quotations. Besides, I have centuries of showing off Greek learning – it was all the rage in Florence when I lived by the Arno.”

“Of course you did.” Lola suspected Mattie never let Carmilla forget it.

“Chic little house with a roof terrace.”

Lola thought about LaFontaine, who had shut themselves away again after the revelation in the Library two days before. “Do you think it'll work, though? If we try to banish Ereshkigal from you and Inanna from me at the same time?”

“How should I know?” Mattie inspected the hanging trail of something that was almost, but not entirely, like a normal ivy tendril. “ _Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the other's death, dying the other's life_. I sometimes wonder whether we should be struggling against it at all.”

“You can't be serious.”

“Curly, I drank the blood of the anglerfish demigod because I though it would give me a rush. I can be serious about a wide and remarkable range of subjects. We might make more progress with a problem that's a bit more immanent, wouldn't you say? What's the worst that could happen?”

Lola thought about all the things that might happen, trying to decide which of them was the worst. It was a close competition. “We could get overwhelmed by the elemental power of ancient forces beyond our ken and warped forever?”

“Well, yes. But then that's already happened to us both, hasn't it? Life has already changed us, death too in my own case.” She jerked her crooked arm, pulling Lola momentarily closer in a motion that could have been accidental but which Lola thought might not have been. “Are you never curious, Lola?”

She sighed, more for the display than for any real annoyance. “Are you never afraid I'll weary of your games, Mattie?”

“Of course not. Because I am ancient and terrible and have... _extensive_ resources to draw upon. You'll not find a way round.” The way she moved her lips spoke clearly of the truth of this, and several things inside Lola fell into place.

“And will you find a way round me, Mattie?” she asked. “Or through, since I am so insubstantial?”

“You're not insubstantial, Lola.” Mattie stopped in her tracks and faced her. The wood was very still all around and in the gap between moments Mattie's hand found Lola's cheek. She held it, firmly, demonstrating its reality. “You see? I couldn't leave marks otherwise.”

Lola felt welcome pain where Mattie's thumb and finger pinched her flesh. “Why is it you won't fade away, Lola? Why, pushed down, do you always come back again in new form?” 

They were not rhetorical questions. Mattie was uncomprehending of something about her and Lola felt that understanding sink into her. She found she was closer to her. "Why do you? Haven't you died and been reborn enough times yourself to know?” Mattie's hand was still on her cheek and as Lola looked steadily into her eyes, the grip tightened with a kind of urgency.

“We are not the same, Lola. You see how we are opposites – you see it here.” And with a jerk Mattie let go and pressed her palm to Lola's chest, where her heart hammered loud enough that both could hear it as clearly as if both had Mattie's senses.

“Yes,” Lola breathed. It was agreement, perhaps, or something else. “Yes, I see it.”

Mattie's hand was on her, pressing through the flesh and ribs to the moving blood beneath, and Lola touched the palm of her own hand to the unbreathing, unbeating chest of Matska Belmonde.

* * *

They were standing on the edge of a great crater. The far side was lost in mist, but the lip disappearing off to the left and right curved slightly so that they must loop round and join far off in the distance. Below the vantage point where they stood was terrace after terrace of grey rock, each one lower and smaller, fitting inside the last like a great mining excavation until they too faded into the darkness beneath. Carmilla and Laura stood holding hands with their toes over the edge. There was a wind to gently flutter their hair, but it wasn't wind from the sky. It came out of the pit, cool air wafting up like some exhalation of the world below.

“We're dreaming, aren't we?” Laura asked. Carmilla tightened her cold grip on her hand.

“Yes.”

“So this is new.”

“Hush.” Carmilla was straining her eyes into the blackness under their feet. “Can you hear?” she asked in a whisper. Laura listened.

There was a grinding below, the sound of stone moving on stone or of machinery starting unwillingly into life. It came upwards from the void with the cool breeze that smelt of ashes and dry clay. It was not exactly unpleasant, but it felt like stillness for all that it was in motion.

“Is something moving down there?” Laura asked. There was a texture to the darkness that suggested variations in tone almost too subtle for the conscious eyes to pick up on.

“Not something. I think it's people.” Carmilla leaned forward slightly, letting Laura cling to her arm with a smothered nervous cry at her stance. “It's getting louder.”

As they listened, the darkness nearest to them began to waver, and the sound became louder, and then they saw them. There were shadowy figures in the pit, climbing up. They scrambled from one terrace to the next, following a thin thread of path winding back and forth, clinging onto the rock slopes but always upwards. The grinding was the sound of feet on stone, hundreds of feet, thousands tramping without rhythm or order but always in the same direction and without slowing for a moment. 

“Let's get back.” Behind them was more craggy slope, shallower than in the pit proper but still steep and sharp under foot. They made it up to an overhanging bluff before the first of the ascending army reached the lip of the pit. She – they could see in the gloom that it was a woman, her long black hair hanging lank and straggly over a face stained with dirt – rested for one sagged step and then moved forwards with one arm upraised in triumph, leading the others forward. From below, out of site below the lip of the crater, a murmur like a million far-distant shouts rose on the air.

Carmilla cried out, and started forward, but Laura pulled at her to stay back. The woman, leading now a file of a half dozen others, looked up and saw them. She did not pause in her progress, but led the procession up the same path Laura and Carmilla had come and with her eyes on the girls' vantage point, she opened her mouth and laughed.

“My mother,” said Carmilla to Laura in horror. “Not the Dean; my birth mother. And look at the others. Or don't. Don't, cupcake.” But Laura couldn't make out any other faces clearly yet.

When the procession was almost level with the overhang, the grey woman split her mouth open and recited.

“ _Dead men naked they shall be one_  
 _With the man in the wind and the west moon_ ;”

The words were familiar – Laura knew them from somewhere, but in the dream could not place their origin - but the woman who Carmilla called her mother had said her part and moved on out of sight under the hanging rock. There were others – nameless, unrecognised - following her who did not speak, but then one who did.

“ _When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone_ ,” wheezed Baron Vordenberg, pausing in his limping ascent to bare the snapped white ends of his ribcage and offer an ironic salute with his cane.

There were more and more visible now, coming not in single file but two abreast, three abreast, and finally flooding over the lip of the crater in hordes, moving slowly but deliberately along the path below Laura and Carmilla's post on the high rock.

“ _They shall have stars at elbow and foot,_ ” said a small woman whose face pushed into Laura's heart by way a dozen photographs in her father's bedroom. She cackled with vicious delight when she saw how her daughter had recognised her.

“ _Though they go mad they shall be sane,_ ” Sarah-Jane laughed, and danced a few steps on her light and soundless feet. She blew a kiss to the girls and jerked her head back and forward, miming breaking her neck as she had when she fell on the night of the party.

Theo Straka raised his fist to the yawning sky. “ _Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again._ ” There was a knife in his belt and drew it to kiss the bloody blade.

Ell smiled, insisting, “ _Though lovers be lost, love shall not._ ” She pressed her hand to a locket she wore and held Carmilla's eyes, before casting a dark glare at Laura.

Recollection of the poetry of Dylan Thomas caught up with Laura and she finished with the final line, “ _And death shall have no dominion._ ”

Danny Lawrence's face cracked open in a leer to reveal her fangs. “Not really what I had in mind, Hollis.”

* * *

LaFontaine made a circle on the roof terrace of the Senate House tower, high up over the campus. They worked tentatively, erasing their lines and redrawing them several times over, guided by a mixture of half-resemblances in Library tomes, a lot of guesswork, and the tenuous web of their own theorizing. 

When it was done they checked the time and, reassured there was a no longer any hurry, drank strong coffee straight from the flask. They admired their handiwork. It was only marginally more scientific than the baroque arrangements of a cargo-cult, but there was the beginnings of a system in their thought and the formation of systems was always good in LaFontaine's mind. They dealt with the contradictions.

This was the place to which they would draw down the vast web of correspondences. At different positions within the circle, outlined in yellow chalk, were precisely placed objects. An old cloth cap, a set of rusted shackles, a charred and melted USB stick. Right in the middle, fixed in place by generous dollops of plasticine, was a large print-out of a tarot card. The Hierophant looked sternly up at them as they patted the corners down and tried not to tread on it.

As above, so below: that was the magical principle repeated again and again in a thousand books. Magic was like the tables of wooden ships and aircraft being shunted around in real time that were used before computers to aid in organising and directing commands. A microcosm which echoed and was echoed by the macrocosm around it. So here in front of LaFontaine was a cascade of associations in a dozen different systems, all tied together. The right card – the High Priest - on the ground. The right stars – Capricorn – pointed to by the chaos of astrological symbols and metal rods bristling from the railings. The right items – JP’s – connected up as if to a great circuit. His name, his history, his role, his place in the vast network of distinctions and differences that made up the system of the world and all piled together so that there was only one person they all converged at.

There was a photograph of him on the laptop screen as he had been following his extraction from the USB key and embodiment in Will’s corpse. Time was ticking on, and LaFontaine made last-minute adjustments to the star sights. It was a poor imitation of the vast deforming rig hosted in their own laboratory, but the principles were the same: focus everything down to a point where it could be contained and controlled.

They should probably cover the screen photo up until it was absolutely necessary. It was kind of distracting, and all that… hormonally squishy stuff was unbalancing. This was for science, and in aid of resurrecting a person with expert knowledge, and also about reuniting with a friend. Not about that friend having been oddly cuddly and occasionally looking at LaFontaine in a way which produced rushes of blood and other such biological ephemera. That was secondary, or should be.

They began the chant. It was in three languages woven together, complex-sounding in its repetitions and reversals but in meaning very simple:

_Come home._

_I have made a space that can hold only you, come fill it._

In the centre of the patchwork of crossing lines, the paper Hierophant wavered, blown by a wind that smelled of ashes and dry clay. LaFontaine lit the candles and smoke was added to the mix.

_Come home._

Perry had always been home for them, far more than any place had been. And that was still true - but it was a simple home for the two of them, a deep and powerful connection but one with little overlap in life and little in common. The wonderful thing about their friendship was the way that didn't matter. But then Jeep had come along with the instant rapport between him and them, the understanding that had come so swiftly that they were immediately working around each other, passing tools and wires and equipment between their hands and hardly noticing which fingers belonged to which person. That was something different, and it hadn't been until the first time LaFontaine and Perry sat down to to dinner after everything at Silas that LaFontaine understood that they had gained a second home only to lose it again.

The night was quiet and still, and nothing moved inside the circle. After a promising start, only an absence.

They slapped the railing in frustration and tried again. What wasn't right? The chant, or the mixture of herbs they had blended in with the chalk? There must have been something wrong, and when they found it JP would come back properly. They went through the chant again, lit the candles, turned three times around the circle but this time there was nothing at all, not even the wind.

By the time they gave up on the second attempt the stars had changed position sufficiently that the latticework of rods and wires needed adjusting. They opened their notebook and in one of the huge tables of combinations, crossed off a couple of boxes. They tried again.

He had been _right there_. He had been right there on the day the Corvae took over the campus and LaFontaine had let him go out to be captured and strung up like a component in a circuit, blinded and killed. It wasn't right that he should have died in the net in the pit. It wasn't right that his sacrifice had been ultimately pointless. It wasn't right that all this... confusing emotional stuff had appeared out of the blue only to be cut off before they could make sense of it.

But if Belmonde could come back then it was possible. They tweaked some of the invocations, trying something slightly more oblique. Nothing happened again. Some of the stars that had risen earlier in the night were setting now, going down again in their endless cycle of fall and rise.

LaFontaine sat down and put their head into their hands so the tears would not show, although they could not have said who might have seen them save the revolving heavens.

* * *

They woke at the same time, Laura rolling over immediately to face Carmilla's staring and horrified eyes. For a moment she doubted that it could have been any different from a normal dream.

“Did you-” she asked, tentative.

“Yes.”

“The pit-”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“One way of putting it, sweetheart.” Carmilla propped herself up and squinted in the sudden light from the bedside lamp. 

“Carm? What are you doing?”

“I'm getting up.” She dragged clothes from where she'd thrown them on the floor the previous evening and hunted around for some shoes. “I want to see the pit where the Lustig used to be.”

“At three in the morning?” Laura sat up in bed.

“Let me think – at three in the morning after a shared dream in which the legions of the dead were climbing out of an endless pit? Yeah. I want to see.”

Laura found her own clothes. “Do we wake the others?” she whispered as they crept down the corridor. There was no light coming from under LaFontaine's door, which was actually quite odd at the moment.

Carmilla shook her head. “Let's be circumspect. We dreamed it. No idea what that means, but it was us who had the dream.”

Outside the campus was quiet. There was only a gentle breeze, the sound of a tawny owl from far off in the forests, and the whir of air vents when they passed the science building. Carmilla didn't go to the pit immediately, but instead walked all around the guest house, peering into the shrubbery under the windows.

“What are you looking for?”

Carmilla didn't reply at once. She scanned the shadowy places under trees before saying, “I don't know. I wondered whether some of them might be up already, I suppose.”

“Some of them?” Laura's heart skipped a beat. “You mean Danny, don't you? You mean like the when I saw her the other day?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you seen anyone? Carm?” she prompted when she got no answer.

Carmilla didn't meet her eyes. “Ell. Yesterday.”

Laura turned her face to look her in the eye. “Why didn't you tell me? Silly brooding creature,” she added, and Carmilla accepted that reproof as fully deserved.

There were two ways into the pit: through the Library, by the passages and tunnels they'd used last year, or into shattered and burned-out ruins of the Lustig. They took the latter, clambering over the fences that had been installed around the scrambled ground and ducking under the planks nailed over the entrance.

“It doesn't seem right,” Laura said. “Like, yesterday I went past here in the daytime and some grad students were playing kickball. And now we're looking for ghosts. How can it be both places at once?”

“Most things are, creampuff. Consistency is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

In this light, there was no clear structure to the hole. In the daylight they would have been able to see the crossing of galleries and walkways below, built up piece by piece as the excavation proceeded. But the Dean had also left one deep shaft descending through the whole thing, whether out of some magical requirement or a sense of drama, or simply because hanging recalcitrant diggers by their ankles over the pit had been her method of keeping order.

“Do you feel it?” Carmilla said. “The air?”

Laura did. There was a greasiness to it, and an electricity. It was like the humid build-up to a thunderstorm. The hairs on her arm were standing on end. It was not the feeling of the mild, dry summer air outside.

“Something's happening.” She came closer to the edge, and Carmilla bumped into her from behind, carefully keeping a hand around her waist. “I can't see.”

“You don't need to see. Listen.”

From the depths came the grinding, tramping, growling sound they had heard in their dream. It rose with the smell of ashes and dry clay, a dozen times more real in waking life. But unlike the dream it did not grow louder, nor did anything move in the darkness beneath. They waited, on the interface between the world above and the world below, straining their eyes and ears for any sign of movement.

“How long has it been?” Laura asked after an age.

“Ten minutes.”

“Nothing's happening.”

Carmilla bumped her forehead against Laura's shoulder. “Something's happening. Maybe it's happening slower in real life.”

“You think they're somewhere down there? Just moving slowly?”

“I don't know. Something's up here. And something's down there. But I'm damned if I know what.”

Laura turned round. “Should we go? Can we do anything now?”

“I wouldn't know what to do. Come on, let's go back. We're not going to go charging into pitch black pits in the middle of the night, cupcake. Who do you think we are?”

She giggled. “I think we're Laura Hollis and Carmilla Karnstein. Because charging into pitch black pits in the middle of the night is exactly the kind of thing we do.”

Laura did have a point, and Carmilla wavered on the edge of decision but before she could do something really stupid there came a shuffling from outside the ruined Lustig, behind them. “What was that?” It came again. “Mattie? Are you out prowling? LaF?”

Laura tried to peer through the gaps in the rickety structure. But wherever she looked, the shuffling came again from another direction. She turned and turned, and Carmilla did the same, but whichever direction they faced it was always in another one.

“Carm? I'm scared.”

“I'd be worried if you weren't.” Their hands met. “See anything?”

“Nothing. But I think we've been here too long. Let's get back.”

“I can't work out where it's coming from. I don't want it behind me!” 

That was the problem with things behind you. Whatever direction you faced, there was always a new behind you to take over from the old one.

“Back to back then, cupcake.” They faced outwards into the night and found each other's hand. That was a kind of solution. “Let's do this undignified thing together. Ready?”

* * *

Lola sat up in bed, staring at the opposite wall and knowing that she could keep doing so all night and nothing at all would happen.

But then nothing would have happened by the morning and she would have to go through another night of staring at the wall. 

She thought about Matska Belmonde. She thought about the utterly impossible thing that had happened on their walk together that afternoon. She thought about the utterly impossible person that was Mattie herself. And she thought about the most utterly impossible thing of all which was that she, Lola Perry, was sitting up of a night wondering whether she could erase from her mind the feeling of Mattie's fingers pressed against the suddenly so thin and yet too thick fabric of her top. 

Well, she'd already defied her old rabbi's forecast and stopped being humble at about whatever the point was where she'd started scolding vampires. So now predictability might well be the next to go. She shuffled the pack of cards and tried for some randomness.

_Are you never curious what would happen?_ Mattie's purring voice said in her ear. _I sometimes wonder whether we should be struggling against it._

The fact that she was even contemplating that was insane, which meant she might as well commit to following it through since she couldn't possible be more cracked. She concentrated and dredged up some words from her memory. They had stuck, much better than anything else from the baffling tide of arcane knowledge that was her social circle these days.

“Goddess of the fearsome divine powers, clad in terror, riding on the great divine powers, Inanna, made complete by the strength of the holy weapon, drenched in blood, rushing around in great battles, with shield resting on the ground, covered in storm and flood, great lady Inanna, knowing well how to plan conflicts, you destroy mighty lands with arrow and strength and overpower lands. In heaven and on earth you roar like a lion and devastate the people.”

She remembered the words of the invocation far better than she had expected given that she'd seen in perhaps twice in Laura's chaotic scrawl. That was either promising or terrifying depending on the perspective you took.

She touched the top card. “From the Great Above to the Great Below, this is I.” She turned it over and found the Chariot. In the insufficient light of the table lamp, the sphinxes could have been any vaguely cat-like creatures, but somehow the red-haired figure with the eight-pointed star on its forehead stood out clearly against its backdrop of stars. There were no reins to drive it.

“From the Great Below the the Great Above, this is my love.” The next card was Death, and Lola understood then that this was all real. There was no vague mention of some future lover with generic characteristics, only the dead thing with the rose.

“Between the Great Above and the Great Below, this is the gate.” And with a sense of inevitability, there were The Lovers. Conclusive enough, but curiosity piqued her for one last question.

“Uniting the Great Below and the Great Above, this is the meaning of my descent.” She was prepared for any number of cards, perhaps the World or the Wheel of Fortune. Even Judgement. But she realised she should not have been surprised to see the Hanged Man, reversed so that his way up was her way down.

Eventually she got up. She took off her pyjamas and found a dressing gown instead to be her only clothing. She released her hair from the tied-up state she kept it in for sleeping. She abandoned her slippers. She left everything in her room and descended.

Down the stairs she went, to the room Mattie had taken on the floor below. Down she went, counting the uneven rails in the banister. She counted each step and tapped each rail, as she did when she was worried. They were steep stairs and she needed only six before she stood outside Mattie's door, uneven floorboards under her feet and a thin light showing in the crack between the hinges. So here was the seventh gate, the threshold to the bedroom.

It wasn't like her not to knock, but she reasoned that her welcome would depend on other factors entirely. So this was probably the appropriate etiquette in the circumstances. She went in.

Mattie was sitting in the beat-up armchair like a queen on her throne. She faced the door, because there was no way she could have been ignorant of Lola's approach. She was wearing the dress she had put on the first time they had spoken following her resurrection, the day she had approached Lola in the kitchen back home. Her eyes watched Lola without surprise or expectation. They waited for her to do what they knew she must.

She had known Mattie was beautiful, but she had seen that beauty in parts in the weeks before. Now it all seemed to swing together and the disparate bits and pieces – the long fingers so clever at touching and so keen to rend, the lips that shone and moved and hid blood and were never still, the fury that interchanged with laughter like summer storms and calms – came together and were united in one impossible contradiction.

She stared at her lover and saw herself reflected in the black pits she was falling into. Half-mad yes, fractured and brittle, twice eaten up by the uncaring world, barely worth noticing. A corndoll of a girl, as Mattie herself had put it. And here she was, come trembling to prove her opponent wrong, feeling her soul push up out of her chest and fill her to the tips of her fingers until she could shine with the intensity in her. 

“I am Lola Perry,” she said, quietly and simply. “I like baking brownies, and the smell of clean rooms, and everything in its place. I like everything being normal and ordered and sensible.

“And it is you who make me want to do this.”

She undid the loose belt of her dressing gown and shrugged it off.


	10. Cleaving

Lola Perry lay in the crater of her downfall and talked as the early sun lit up Mattie's cheekbones.

It was not quite how she had imagined such mornings. She could not watch the rise and fall of her lover's chest, since Mattie did not breath except when deliberately heaving a dramatic sigh. Nor did Lola's slowly migrating fingers find a heartbeat or pulse in any part of her body. But she was warm, and so she curled up in the warmth that smelt of resiny myrrh and dried roses and above all of Mattie.

“- and Carmilla was trying to be all menacing and play Bad Cop,” she was saying quietly against the still softness of Mattie's shoulder. “And she was doing such a good job of it! I mean, I didn't know she was a vampire, but I was _terrified_.”

Mattie laughed softly. “And the arrow-happy Amazon?”

“Oh, she was freaking out! Mel was not in badass mood in those days.” Lola had rather liked her in the awkward geek phase, but she chose not to mention that fact. “So Carmilla was breaking pencils everywhere and sorting through the torture equipment – well, now I can see she was just wasting time so we'd confess before she had to do anything too drastic-”

“Always the sentimental one, our Kitty.”

“She's a sweet person underneath it all. When she communicates properly. But I was keeping my fingers well out of the way.”

Mattie yawned, cat-like, her fangs showing bright and sharp. Lola rubbed the puncture marks on both sides of her neck. The biting had been mildly unexpected. Liking it had been rather more so. How long had it been since she'd descended the stairs? It seemed a different world, with a different Lola Perry, but it hadn't yet been twelve hours.

“What _is_ the time?” she wondered out loud. She rolled over to find her watch, ignoring Mattie's protest, and then remembered how little she had actually taken with her when coming down last night. Blushing – absurdly in the circumstances - she shuffled herself half out of bed and pulled some covers with her before deciding that that was a pointless manoeuvre if ever there had been one. She dumped the unnecessary modesty and just continued to the window to see if she could spy the clock on the campus tower.

Outside was broad and bright sunshine, throwing clean neat shadows from the trees on campus. She looked back to watch Mattie watching her.

So this was what going mad felt like. It felt like standing naked in the morning sunlight as an exceptionally beautiful vampire admired the bitemarks on her body and enjoying it. 

A word floated into her mind, one of the ones that had annoyed her when she was learning English. _Cleave._ Meaning to separate – or to join. Double meanings, quite opposite.

“Death and the maiden,” she commented to the room. Mattie rolled her eyes at the cliché. Inaccurate on one count, as well. “All right then. Death and whatever got into me last night.”

“Darling, if you're about to start chattering your delightful but exhausting angst, I can suggest better things to do with your tongue.” She sat up in bed, incidentally dislodging the already inadequate cover of the duvet.

Lola felt the blood in her cheeks, but this was the next phase in the game. She meandered around the room, picking at the piles of trinkets and clothes that Mattie had somehow managed to stockpile in between seducing her and investigating a cosmic mystery.

“No need to be crude, Mattie,” she said primly. “Surely with your PR experience and time conveying portentous messages from the Underworld, you're beyond innuendo?”

Mattie drew herself up in bed and let her attitude of _deshabille_ morph into _hauteur_. “The Queen of Blood and Ashes doesn't appreciate you, curly girl. She doesn't like that you seek to escape her. She doesn't like that you play host to her sister. She doesn't like that you're over there by the window when you could be stretched out on the pillows with that gorgeous hair around your shoulders.” She winked and Lola giggled despite herself.

“Isn't that the kind of joke that gets you permanently locked in some kind of underworld dungeon?” She hovered just out of the reach of Mattie's snatching hand.

“If you can't make a joke about a chthonic death goddess then you don't understand comedy.” She relented and patted the bed besides her. “Lola. Bed. Hmm?”

Bed was a good idea. Lola flopped herself down and allowed Mattie to reacquaint her lips with the lines of her cheekbones.

“You've gone cold.”

“So get warming. You're the one with a heartbeat.”

“Mattie! I'm serious. You were warm a moment ago. You're freezing now.” She seized Mattie's hand and pressed it to her cheek. It was as cold as if it had been stretched out in a freezer. She felt like a corpse.

Mattie pulled away. “Ah. It passes.” She shrugged as if Lola had detected a pinprick.

“It's happened before?”

“Increasingly. Since I got back. Sometimes.”

“It's her coming through. Isn't it?”

“Are you surprised, Lola?” Mattie watched her carefully but spoke firmly, not allowing an interruption. “Have you been quite yourself of late? Getting angry a lot, aren't you? Waking up at night with the urge to go downstairs?”

Lola stared at her. That had all been... normal. Insofar as anything these days was normal.

Mattie pressed on. “Suddenly able to divine the future?” She paused, and something of her normal teasing manner came back. “Sexuality more active than normal? I haven't seen any roaring, but you're not exactly quiet when-”

“Oh, now I've been provoked on that front!” Lola protested, feeling her cheeks flush, and then remembered what they were supposed to be talking about. “And that's not the same!”

“Is it not?” Mattie touched her own wrist and seemed satisfied at the result, because when she stroked Lola's cheek her fingers had regained some of their life. Cool, rather than cold.

“You haven't said anything to the others.” 

She shook her head. “I can't pretend I like the sound of being returned to the primordial abyss. But I'm damned it I'm going to have that ginger Frankenstein shoot spells at me like I'm some kind of supernatural pincushion. It would be undignified. Anyway,” she stretched, “it passes, like I said. See?”

Her hand was warm again.

“Mattie-”

“See?”

She glanced down. “Ah. Well, yes, but-”

“ _See?_ ”

“ -you might need to show me again.”

And once she had been shown, Lola fiddled with Mattie's hair, remembering their talk from a few days ago and her promise. “I still think you're a monster, Mattie. I think you're wicked. I think you're callous and cruel and bloodthirsty.” She leaned over and kissed her on her smiling lips.

Those eyes flicked around her face in amusement. “Darling, how sweet of you.”

* * *

Laura tumbled back into consciousness, or perhaps she had already been conscious. It was hard to tell. She had drifted on the edge of sleep for the remainder of the night, moving between the real world of being folded so tightly into Carmilla that she could hardly move and the unreal world of clinging frantically to Carmilla as the dead battered on the windows. She couldn't be sure that the two worlds had remained entirely separate.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Carmilla had dark circles around her eyes, not for once from the smudging of ultra-thick eyeliner. She shifted her entangled body to draw her face level with Laura's, their noses touching. They did not pull apart even one inch.

“You want to talk about it?” Laura asked.

“Not really.” A cough from Laura prompted her out of the brooding and into the awareness of their agreement on communication. “Fine, let's talk about it.”

“That was real, last night.”

“Yeah.”

“Something's down in the pit. Coming up. And there's someone or something moving around in the Lustig.”

“That's about the shape of it.” Carmilla somehow found a way to wind her leg even tighter around Laura's.

She brought it all up to the surface. The endless sound of marching and climbing, and the dream of who had been the ones arising. Her own mother, and Carmilla's, and Ell and Sarah-Jane and-

“And Danny.” Laura shuddered. As if Carmilla had not dreamt it also, she went on. “It wasn't Danny how she really was. She was that, that _thing_ she became when the Dean got her claws in. That thing she became because of what I made-”

“Stop it. That, right there.”

“But-”

“Stop. Creampuff.”

“How do you do it, Carm? The guilt?”

Carmilla shrugged. “Practice. Patience. And realising you've got no choice but to keep it with you and go on.” She watched Laura's eyes until she saw this hadn't helped. “Don't look it in the eyes, cupcake. You can't make it better by clinging to it. Keep it with you if you must – and I know you must, or you wouldn't be you - but don't look back.”

“It doesn't make sense. It can't. Up here the sun's shining and there's birdsong and I'm with you and it's so good. But then everything that happened to make it so.” She felt the tears coming. “All the people who died and the people who were hurt and the people who lost themselves. The worlds don't go together, it doesn't justify-”

“You think this is about fair, Laura? About justice? We didn't make some bargain – Danny's life for yours, or Ell's life so I could meet you one day. It's not a deal we made. Don't take it all on yourself. We made only the one exchange, remember? And that one turned out pretty good.” She pulled her face away just enough to let Laura see her clearly. “Every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things or make them unimportant.”

Laura frowned. The words were familiar, but not what she expected from her girlfriend. “That's.... that's Doctor Who.” She started to giggle despite herself. “It is, isn't it? Oh my gosh, you've only been _pretending_ to sleep through it!”

“Some of it does go in, cupcake,” Carmilla admitted, looking mildly ashamed, and then added defensively, “I liked the Van Gogh one.”

It took an hour before they finally crept downstairs, Laura expecting motherly concern from Perry over their missing breakfast (the most important meal of the day). There was, however, no Perry. There was no Mattie. There was a LaF, but they were curled up on the sofa asleep with half a bowl of cornflakes unfinished on the coffee table. Laura shifted it aside before poking them awake.

“Wah?”

“LaF. Where's the rest?”

“I 'unno. Whas time?”

“Midday. Did you not sleep at night or something?”

“No stars in day. Ver' inconvenient of sun.” They blinked the sleep out of their eyes and managed to take in the surroundings. “Ah. Back in the conscious world. And I'm not being scolded for eating cereal on the sofa in my pyjamas. Oh God, what's happened to Perry?”

Carmilla coughed politely. “I'm not suggesting anything, but Mattie's not around either.”

“Huh. The mind boggles.” They appeared genuinely impressed. “You know, apparently there are people in the world who understand their best friends. It must be a dull and sad life for them. Reminds me Fangs, I owe you twenty euros for the other night.” They helped themselves to the dissolved remains of cornflakes.

The sound of a door opening from above and from down the stairs crept Mattie and Perry, the former performing her entrance with the normal dash of drama, the latter torn between skulking out of sight and not letting Mattie get too far ahead of her.

“Well, the gang's all here,” Mattie purred. “What have we all missed? It looks like _everyone's_ been up all night.” Perry went even redder and tweaked her turtleneck up a little higher.

* * *

“All right.” LaFontaine was addressing the troops, on the basis that they were the one wearing the most equipment strapped to belts and webbing. “So we don't know exactly what we're going to find down there. If you two are right,” they nodded at Laura and Carmilla, “it might be nothing tangible, but on the other hand it might be some underworld demon or legion of the undead or frankly anything else not under the sun. Are we clear?”

Lola tried to look businesslike and ready for action, but Mattie's finger was creeping very slowly up and down her spine and it took all of her mental focus to actually work out what LaFontaine was saying.

“We're not clear,” said Carmilla. “But I guess we're going in anyway.”

“Good enough. The mission is: go in, find out what the hell's going on down there, run like fuck till we get back, then try and figure out a plan. If we've got spare time in the evening, it's god-banishing time on Perr and Belmonde. L, you want to do inspirational speeches, or is that for later?”

“Later, please.”

The inside of the Library was quiet. LaFontaine led the way through the great entrance hall with JP's memorial plaque on one of the pillars. They led the way first of all in the direction of the old hideout from last year, which was at least a familiar location with a known route into the pit. There had been consideration of going straight down into the chasm under the Lustig, but nobody had any idea what state the route down might be in. This way they could enter from the side about halfway down and with the option to escape quickly into the labyrinth of the Library if something went terribly wrong.

“Right.” LaFontaine was speaking to themselves as an aid to their own thought as much as to anyone else. “Spatial comparisons are technically nonsense, but grosstopically – I mean from a subjective notion of successively linking short distances - we can consider ourselves to be on a level with the first gate. The anglerfish crater under the Lustig bottoms out about thirty feet over our heads – although _not_ actually over our heads because Library – and the subsequent excavations proceed in an anti-clockwise helix downwards from there. We intercept them between the third and fourth gates as we did last time. This way.”

There was little pattern or plan to the rooms of the Library. One room might be a mouldering, abandoned room filled with loose leaves from old dictionaries, the next a brightly lit, freshly polished bibliophile's dream in morocco leather. Here and there in the dustier spots were dragged spots of clean floor, as if something or someone had stumbled through. It was best not to wonder what. None of them looked like human footprints.

Lola caught herself chewing the inside of her cheek and told herself firmly to stop. What she could not stop was straining her ears for that sound of rustling and shuffling Laura had reported from the other night, or for the crunching of footsteps marching upwards. The air in here was stale and unpleasant-tasting. She had been feeling sicker and sicker as the journey had gone on, and it wasn't getting any better. She needed some fresh air.

Finally the twining route opened onto an arrangement of three rooms surrounding a descending spiral staircase. LaFontaine pointed at it. “There. Twenty steps down and there's a door into a side gallery from the excavation. We might even find the shoe I lost trying to carry Fangs out when she went for the sword.”

“How do you keep count of where these things are?” Laura wanted to know. “There's like a thousand doors in this place.”

“That's putting it lightly.” Carmilla peered over the balustrade at the descending stairs. “Well, this time round without vampire strength. After you I think, sis.”

Mattie flicked her hair. This dramatically descending a spiral staircase activity was probably familiar to her, Lola supposed - although no ballgown hanging off her shoulders today, sadly. She did look back to make sure Lola was watching from a suitable angle though - and then her face fell.

“Lola? What's wrong?”

Lola took a moment to understand everyone was looking at her. This didn't make any sense. She wasn't doing anything. 

“I'm-”

LaFontaine was at her shoulder at once. They hardly seemed to cross the intervening distance. “Perr? Perr, I think you need to sit down. That's not a good colour on you.”

Lola blinked once and found she was already sitting on the ground and with everyone crowding around her. LaFontaine had shouldered Mattie out of the way and the concern on her face was such that she'd hardly registered the affront.

Lola felt sick. She felt very sick. And how her cheeks must be red, how hot they were. She tried to focus. What was the last thing someone had said?

“Thousand doors,” she nodded. “Yes, thousand doors. Good. Are we going?” It was very important: thousand doors.

“Yes.” LaFontaine tried to take her hands, which was silly because they should be going downstairs now. “But right now you should be telling us about your temperature. Come on, stay sitting down. That's it. Laura, back pocket of my rucksack. Small green bottle. Belmonde, if you've done anything to her-”

“Overwhelmed.” Lola's voice came out very small and far away. There was suddenly an empty green bottle in LaFontaine's hand and a weird taste in Lola's mouth, like tonic wine or one of those vile energy drinks made of polysyllabic chemicals.

“What's overwhelming, Perry?” It was Laura, kneeling down and trying to get Lola to look her in the eye and it was suddenly so annoying that they were doing this rather than letting her go downstairs. Strong hands appeared on her shoulders, and she patted the fingers with their perfectly-shone nails absently. 

“ _A woman once lived in a desert_ ,” she said, knowing they weren't going to understand. 

“ _In her tower she kept all the knowledge in the world_ ,” completed Carmilla for her. Lola tried to smile thanks, but it came out as half an expression of pain and a half a snarl. Carmilla poked Laura's side. “That was you, cutie. When you in the other place, that was one of your garbled texts.”

“What does-”

“I don't know.” She leant down. “Hey curly. _To go left_..?”

Lola knew that one. “ _One has to go right three times._ ” Easy. Right is left when you do it enough. Anyone could see that.

Mattie had had enough of hovering around. She yanked Laura and LaFontaine out of the way and pushed her face into Lola's. It reminded her of somebody familiar, but she couldn't think who.

“Lola darling? Where are you?”

Mattie pressed a hand to her cheek and the room started shaking. It was shaking inside Lola's head most of all, but it felt like it was shaking outside too. Either that or the books were no longer comfortable on the shelves. Maybe that was it. They weren't correct, not in the correct places. Not right, that disorder. Where to put them? Back home she would-

Should she be closing her eyes and thinking of home?

“Lola, what are you doing in there?”

She was angry all at once, very angry, with knots and heat in her belly. What was she doing? What was she doing? Lola wasn't the one coming up from where she should be down, Lola wasn't the one upsetting it all, Lola wasn't the one making it all be upside down.

She raised her gaze to Mattie's and felt the lions looking out of her eyes. The vampire was suddenly afraid, she could see it.

“ _If a woman jumps up_ , sister mine,” she hissed from out of the vast space behind her where lay the expanse of the heavens, “ _she falls back down_. She does.”

Everything happened at once. Mattie's face rippled and the veneer of civilisation cracked. Under the thin skin – so thin it had been that morning under Lola's hands - was a skull and the bones moved and there was darkness between the bones and in the empty mouth fangs screamed. Her body folded backwards and she swayed as if buffeted by a gale.

Lola was thrown back as well, crawling from the pain that came from black eyes and the smell of ashes and dry clay. But they were closer to her surface here than to her sister's pit and with the thundering of armies and the the clatter of chariot wheels in her head, she open her mouth wider than it could go and roared until the ground broke in the shuddering.

* * *

Everything was still at last.

Lola raised up on an elbow and immediately broke out in a coughing fit. The air was full of dust, both the normal dank Library mould and a dry plastery powder which was the fabric of the pulverised building.

“LaF?” she asked through a choked mouth. “Mattie? Laura?” She had to blink several times before she could keep her eyes open in the dirty air.

There was a wordless grumbling from a few feet away. She scrabbled herself half a turn around, still not daring to get up, and found LaFontaine crawling out of a pile of fallen books. They froze.

“Don't move, Perr. Do not move.”

She paused and tried to get her bearings. In front of her was the destroyed room, filled with wooden fragments, tumbled books, broken masonry and plaster. Behind her was-

“Oh heck. LaF?”

Right behind her the floor ceased to be and in its place was a gaping chasm lined with the splintered ends of boards. One of her feet dangled over the edge. Lower floors could be seen through the hole, likewise torn into pieces, and all the way down the sides of the great rent were precarious slopes of what had once been patches of floorboards or staircases come loose from their attachments. But the bottom of it was lost in utter darkness, too far down to see. Above them, a slash of daylight shone through the fault in the roof.

LaFontaine got themselves unsteadily up onto two feet and pulled Lola away from the edge. Only then did she manage to stand and check the situation. She had got away lightly, having been curled up in a ball before anything even fell near her. 

“Are you-”

“I'm fine,” she said hurriedly. “Everything's back to normal. Relatively speaking. You've lost your eyepatch.”

“Thought something was itching.” LaFontaine's voice was aggressively normal. They hunted around under the loose books covering the floor until they turned it up, rubbing the grit off until it could go on again.

They came close to the rift in the floor and cupped their hands around their mouth. “Laura?” they shouted, “Carmilla?”

Lola's stomach turned over. They had been right there, on the side of the room now fallen into the abyss. “Laura?” she shouted. “Oh no. No. Mattie! _Mattie!_ ”

Nothing came back to them from the pit.

“Right. Carmilla, Laura and Belmonde fallen into a massive new pit in the middle of the Library. Best friend broke the sentient god-archive by screaming.” LaFontaine was talking to themselves as much as to Lola. “I mean, that _be normal_ outburst back in third year was impressive, but still. That's new.”

Lola hovered just out of reach. “Please tell me you didn't bring shackles, LaF.”

“What? No!” They shook themselves into focus. “Okay. Objective one: rescue Laura and Carmilla. Objective two: what the fuck just happened?”

“I, um. I had an Inanna thing.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Didn't think it was low blood sugar. Is it because we're close to the gates?” They squatted down and retrieved a small retractable torch from the jangle of useful bits and bobs strung on their beltloops. The thin lightbeam lit up the wall on the other side of the rift, but could not penetrate to the bottom of the darkness beneath.

“I think it was... you know, Mattie. She got close and it got worse.”

“Yeah, I would have suspected physical proximity myself if it weren't for the fact it's damned obvious what you two were doing last night.” They studiously did not look round at this bombshell. 

Lola preferred to leave that one unanswered until such a time as she might have any answers. “Do you think they could have survived that fall?” she asked. Asking the question seemed to make the better answer slightly more likely somehow.

LaFontaine coughed and stepped back from the edge. They put a hand on her shoulder. “No thinking yet. Let's just get down there, okay? The safe way. Come on.” They led the way away from the wreckage, heading for one of the staircases further out from the centre – whatever 'centre' meant in this place.

Lola kept expecting the Library to do something to her. It was sentient, wasn't it? And she'd just blasted a great hole in the middle of it. It should be... reacting, or fighting back or something. But apart from the bizarre geometry, there was no active sign of the deity inhabiting the infinite shelves. Maybe it was busy elsewhere. Its centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere, after all.

She was about to ask LaFontaine their opinion when they raised a hand and motioned her not to talk. They crept on tiptoe to one side of the fragmented reading room in which they had found themselves and picked up a piece of wood from a pile of debris.

“Laf!” Lola hissed.

“Shush! Listen!”

From somewhere behind them was a sounds of dragging and shuffling: somebody moving towards them. It came closer, and the source of the sound sunk downwards as it did so until the person was clearly moving along directly underneath them. And then it changed direction as the dragging passed them by at a lower level and came now ahead, from a stairwell sunk into the next room.

“Hello?” LaFontaine called ahead at the source of the shuffling as it rose and grew clearer. “Someone there? Laura?”

“Hide,” Lola whispered, and LaFontaine nodded. They did not go into the next stair gallery, but slid out of sight behind the wonky-angled walls to watch the person climb up to meet them.

They came up slowly but steadily, cloaked head bobbing behind the balcony rails until it was joined by a tall but slumped body, all veiled in flowing grey except for one extended pale hand grasping at the stair rail and another holding a stick with which to sweep the ground before. They groped when the rail ran out and moved forward with hand extended until reaching a bookcase from which all books had fallen out. Despite the difficulty of shuffling through the tide of dropped volumes the figure chose to remain always close to the shelves, guiding themselves by fingers trailing on the wood.

They were dressed all in grey, some loose garment that might have been called an old robe or a new shroud. The hood was pulled down low so that they could not possibly have seen out below it, if their feeling the way forward hadn't already spoken of somebody unseeing. Lola heard her heart in her ears and saw LaFontaine's grip tighten in their hiding place.

“Stop right there,” LaFontaine challenged. They took up position in the doorway with Lola behind them and chair leg in hand.

“Have we startled you?” the man asked – and the voice was familiar. “Our sincerest apologies.” He stepped forward towards the pair and lowered his hood. His face pale and ascetic with a thin beard, he wore a blindfold tightly wound over his absent eyes.

Lola gave a cry and stepped half forward.

“Jeep?” LaFontaine asked. Disbelief was in their voice. They tried twice to ask before sound came out again. “JP, is that you?”

A ripple of relief passed over the man's face, his mouth tweaking into a smile. He gulped for air before speaking, a nervous reflex that was so very familiar.

“Ah, LaFontaine,” said the librarian. “I... I believe so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading [Laura's](https://twitter.com/Laura2theLetter/status/783300644123934720) [tweets](https://twitter.com/Laura2theLetter/status/784453244873502720) from her time in the other universe gives you a very special form of headache.


	11. Chiasmus

Hugging was happening.

“Is anyone else as uncomfortable as I am with this level of physical contact?” JP asked after a while, fidgeting a bit in the wrap-around of arms.

“Extremely.”

“Oh yes, definitely.”

There was a motion of general dusting down. Lola straightened out her top as much as was possible in the circumstances to allow LaFontaine their rather slower peel away from JP's side.

He was thinner than she remembered, which was difficult, and his skin had a faintly unwell tinge to it like someone who had seen too little sun for too long. He ducked his head in the way he had always done when nervously skipping eye contact, for all that he'd never truly make eye contact again.

“You died,” LaFontaine said when their shock of confusion had caught up with their shock of joy. They squeezed his wrist again as if to check it was still solid. There were deep pitted scars on it, what looked like puncture wounds, but he was physical enough.

“Yes. Yes, I must admit I did,” JP said, then added helpfully, “I imagine you are about to inquire as to what precipitated my post-mortem presence here.”

Lola nodded vigorously with wide eyes and LaFontaine said, “Uh... yeah. Yeah, that had crossed my mind. One of the first things, actually.”

“Might we sit down? My feet are not quite healed.” He lowered himself to the ground supported by his stick. Lola pulled some discarded books to make a comparatively dust-free seat for herself. “Hmm. You will no doubt have surmised that I am in the role of High Priest to Enki, which is to say – and I do approximate here to evade metaphysics for the moment – the Library's representative.”

Lola circled this statement in her head and found herself mildly appalled that this made an awful lot of sense, really, in the grand scheme of the last weeks.

“It was on the plaque,” LaFontaine said. “And it's why the Dean killed you.”

“The Sixth Seal required the death of a High Priest,” he agreed. “Or Priestess. She had anticipated using Miss Karnstein, but when she became unavailable and the Dean determined the nature of my connection to the Library, she wasted no time in killing me. Though I imagine she had planned to do so eventually anyway.”

“Why had she been keeping you around? Mel said you had... lights on you, like you were strung up somewhere.”

“She believed torturing me while I was wired up might open up a back door into the Library's firewall and allow her more direct access to you. Perhaps it would have, but she was unsuccessful.” He gestured at his blindfold covering his absent eyes and the network of scars on his wrists. “She did try an exhaustive range of options before settling on sacrifice as the best use of me. It was most unpleasant.”

“And you died.”

“Naturally. The Seal opened. But as Miss Hollis experienced in the other world we moved her into, the Library's relationship to time and place are... non-Euclidean to say the least.” He coughed. “To attempt an explanation. Ah. I was killed by the Dean once before, you may remember, when she possessed Miss Hollis and I was stored in the incommodious USB stick.”

“I had a spare,” LaFontaine said.

“Indeed. You had simply to connect the spare to a computer and carry on. I confess such duplication of my consciousness would once have been the stuff of existential crises, though fortunately my attitude towards personal identity has somewhat broadened since 1874. However, the salient point is that no Library worth its salt would be without a respectable archiving system. It had merely to save a copy at the instant of death, await the opening of the Seal, and remove my body to storage until such a time as I could be put back in.”

“We thought you'd disintegrated. Nobody found a body, even when Mel showed the soldiers where to look.”

“Some minor rearrangement of passages. And also of time.” A thought struck him. “If I may ask, how is Melanippe? I fear she was most distressed by my predicament.”

“I got a card from her last month,” Lola put in. “Full of complaining about how Elsie had never once managed to get up for their morning run. So I think she's fine, all things considered.”

JP smiled happily. “Ah, with Miss Holmwood? I did wonder. So: the Library had a backup copy of me and kept my body around in stasis for later reactivation at the opportune moment.” He wafted his hand through the air until he found LaFontaine's knee and patted it absently. “The opportune moment being... well, time is an issue here, but I think not more than two days ago. After a year of waiting.”

Lola shuddered. “What was it like?”

“Oh, I was bodiless and trapped a library for more than a century. So being bodiless and in a spiritual union with a library for another year was like a holiday by comparison.” He beamed around at them. “And here I am! Right where I'm needed, when I'm needed. Presumably, anyway. It's all a bit blurry.”

“So do you know what happened to Laura and Carmilla?” LaFontaine asked.

“And Mattie?” Lola added quickly.

JP frowned. “I... should. I think. The trouble is I'm not very well categorised at the moment. It's all here – insofar as it fits into a human skull, anyway – but _in potentia_ rather than _in praesentia_. A little difficult to remember one's co-ordinates in time and space, if that makes any sense to you. I don't want to give you yesterday's answers. Or tomorrow's. Or those for the wrong reality.”

Lola sighed. Why was nothing ever easy?

LaFontaine snapped their fingers. They waved their finger at Lola's pocket until she caught on and handed over her pack of cards, a bit more dog-eared and bent than they had once.

“JP. Just need to get your bearings in reality? Well, we have a system of co-ordinates. You can channel the Library. So stand up and tell your boss to catch!” They threw.

The cards fountained over their head, circled high and then flowed downwards to hang in the air around the three of them. Each revolved gently in its orbit before coming to rest, face inwards, so that they were inside the ball of twinkling paper as if in a planetarium.

“I can't-”

“I will. Still got a perfect memory, Jeep?” He nodded and LaFontaine took his hand and held it aloft, pointing at the summit. “The Hanged Man.” They swivelled. “The Empress. Death. Two of Pentacles. Are you getting this?”

“I believe so.” He grinned. “You know, this is rather clever. Almost like casting the whole universe's horoscope. Who's behind me?”

“Temperance. Five of Wands. Three Cups.”

“I see. Oh, I do see.” He muttered to himself under his breath as LaFontaine continued reciting. “Challenge is not to gather new information but sift what is there. Find spacetime co-ordinates where listed arrangement of cards is true and thereby ascertain position of all objects and beings within the Library which is wholly present in all times and places.”

“Where are Laura and Carmilla?”

“Near the bottom of the pit. Alive. Somewhat damaged.”

“Where's Mattie?”

“Nowhere.” 

Lola felt her heart drop for a moment. “Dead?” she asked in a whisper.

“No. Dead is somewhere. Ms Belmonde is not somewhere.” He shrugged. 

LaFontaine cracked their knuckles. “The million-euro question, Jeep: _What the hell is going on?_ ”

* * *

Laura lay groaning for a few minutes until satisfied that the floor wasn't going to hit her again. She hurt a great deal in various places but the pains hadn't yet separated out enough to be divided into discrete injuries.

“Did we fall _upwards_?” she asked, to nobody in particular. There was definitely a particular centre of pain in her right leg, and it felt warmer than it should have. High up on the wall in front of her was what looked very much like her own footprint in the mould and dust, which would have been unexpected anywhere else than here.

“Amongst other directions.” Carmilla crawled out from a pile of what appeared to be a pile of empty drinks cartons. “I distinctly remember a U-turn just before blacking out from the G-force. That's what you get when a sentient Escher drawing collapses. But hey, we're alive.” Her cheek had a nasty red mark stamped across it.

“Oh crap. My leg.” Now that Laura's head was settling down and the minor pains in her wrists and back were fading, she was becoming very conscious that the major pain in her leg was not. She tried to drag it into view and gasped as the needle-like shock made that a bad idea. Her stomach tensed seeing how dark the lower half of her jeans leg was.

“Yeah, that is a certain amount of blood,” Carmilla said, her voice deliberately calm. “Just a moment. I think I'm – ah, fuck it! – down by one ankle, as it turns out.” She had tried to get up, but was forced to settle for scooting in a sitting position over to where Laura lay in a mess of empty cardboard boxes and food wrappers.

There were no windows in the space they found themselves but with galleries leading off through dark doorless openings and all the piles of used supplies stacked haphazardly this could only be a part of the excavations. Over their heads, the ceiling was an empty hole fringed with loosely jutting beams. 

Laura chanced a second look at her leg while Carmilla poked gentle at it. No unusual angles, but it wouldn't bear weight and the pain was unignorable now. “Okay _fuck_ ,” she growled as Carmilla tried to roll up her jeans to see where the blood was coming from. “What does it look like? Carm?”

“You're okay, cutie.” Carmilla's voice was still too calm, but her jaw unclenched slightly and she breathed out heavily, once. “The blood's actually from a nasty cut on your calf – see here where you caught on something and your jeans tore - so the fracture might not be as bad as it looks. But we'd best be getting you to a hospital all the same.”

“Tetanus shots and ice cream again?”

“You father knew what he was talking about.” She shifted herself around and propped her back up against the same pile of boxes as Laura. “Ouch. Shit.”

“Your ankle?” She leaned forward, but Carmilla batted her hand away.

“Could be worse. I got shot once, this is nothing.”

They inspected their phones. Laura's was shattered and unusable, but Carmilla's could at least turn on. No signal. They looked up through the giant hole in the ceiling through which they had fallen, although oddly there was no hole in the ceiling of the room above. Presumably that was where the Library had bent their fall through ninety degrees, though given the sensation of falling upwards, downwards, sideways and everything else it was hard to tell.

“No lines of communication,” Carmilla said. “You've got one unusable leg, I've got something not right with my ankle. When does the glorious rescue appear? I feel it's our turn this time.”

Laura waved her hand at the stacks of equipment and supplied. “There's plenty of things here. We could... make splints and crutches and try to find a staircase? Or maybe there'll be a working radio or something. Mel managed to podcast from down here even with the Corvae breathing down her – okay, what in Hogwarts was _that_?”

The room had resounded to the ringing of a bell. The sound had a cracked, broken feel to it, the very opposite of a pleasing chime. Laura felt her skin creep and her hair stand on end. There were goosebumps on Carmilla's bare arm. The sound had come not from above or below them, nor from any clear direction, but from every direction at once. After a few seconds of strained listening it came again, and then a third time in quick succession. The resonances of the final strike faded into a grinding and a scraping, as of stone turning against stone.

Carmilla seized her hand, and Laura turned her head sharply to see Mattie standing in one of the doorways. She was not looking at them, but blankly ahead, inspecting each of the other doorways in turn.

“Sis?” Carmilla asked. There was no response. She stood very still save for the sharp movements of her head to face each route in turn. After a second inspection, she chose one and walked precisely forward, stepping almost robotically with none of her normal grace. Carmilla called her name twice, but Mattie gave no sign that she had even heard. She passed on out of sight.

“Did you see? How Mattie was-”

Laura squeezed her shoulder. “I don't think that's Mattie, Carm.”

“What are you talking about, of course it was-”

“Yeah. I mean, I don't think she was in the driving seat. Come on.” Laura did some careful shuffling, focusing on getting to one foot and finding a stack of crates to prop herself up on.

“Laura, what are you doing?” She tried to tug her back down to sit. “You have a broken leg.”

But Laura swivelled from the crates to one of the mouldy walls and half-clung, half dragged herself to where a broom was discarded on the floor.

“Mattie wasn't herself just then. Well, who was she? Because if she's who I think she is right now, she probably knows the way up. Following her is our best chance. Come on!” She winced in the stabbing pain as she had to sink down to grab hold of the broom. Carmilla crawled across to join her.

“We're going to need another broom, then.”

There was a distinct shortage of approximate crutches in the storeroom, but a half-flattened bar of metal that had probably once been part of a scaffold turned up behind the empty juice box mountain.

Arranging themselves took several minutes and one genuine scream from Laura when they slipped and she put too much pressure on her broken leg, but eventually the pair of women found a way to stand up. Laura stood on the left with her blood-soaked leg on the inside and propping herself up with the broom handle jammed between flagstones, and Carmilla clinging to her right shoulder doing the same with the metal pole.

“Partners were cheek to cheek,” Laura found herself giggling despite herself. “Shoulder to shoulder. In 2016 it may as well have been sex.”

Carmilla chuckled. “We'd best get going then. Or we'll be dancing all night and Mattie will have gone. So, right foot forward – that's me.” She got the pole forward, moved with her good foot, and one half-step was complete. She held Laura while she did the same. Two feet of progress.

“It's a long way to the top. Well, unless the Library's kind with its architectural arrangements. And that would be a _really awesome thing to be kind about right now_ ,” Laura added with a raised voice.

They moved slowly, pausing after each step, but the gaps between flagstones and the close-packed walls made progress possible without slipping. Mattie had long gone by the time they came out of the crash site into a long passage, but there was a straight path ahead with no doors and footsteps in the dry dust. From behind them and ahead of them was still the quiet sound of grinding.

“I know this place,” Laura said suddenly when they came to a junction. Mattie's pathway led to the right, up a gentle incline, but there was also a wooden walkway leading off to the left. “This is where we came last year. The Seventh Gate is down there.” She pointed down the walkway.

“You're sure?”

“Yeah, I saw it enough times editing those videos.” She felt her hair on end. “Let's put some distance between us and it.”

They moved on. The corridor had a breeze, a soft tailwind blowing from the direction of the Seventh Gate. It carried something, a distant whispering with indistinguishable words.

“What was that?”

“Cupcake?”

“You heard that, right? The whispering?”

Laura watched Carmilla concentrate, willing her to hear it, but she just shook her head.

“Nothing. But let's keep going. Eyes front, Hollis.”

_\- Listen up, Hollis -_

“No, I definitely heard something. We need to turn around Carm, there's something back there. Someone.”

“Laura, there is nothing back there we want to see.” She tugged at her back, the two still wrapped in their mutual support.

_\- We are coming -_

They didn't come, at least not walking or climbing or floating. Rather, it was as if they had always been there. The gentle breeze shifting the hair across Carmilla's face was at once the fingers of a pale girl stroking her cheek. The itching splinter in Laura's left wrist was the scratching of a fingernail, the tickling dust on the back of her neck faded into somebody's breath.

There were hands, made of air and the stirrings of dust. Unseen feet stirred the debris of the passage floor, thickened in knots of air. Laura tried to turn round as much as she could but whichever direction she looked they seemed to be coming from just behind her, cold fingers pressing into her neck, tugging at her hair. Carmilla's face in front of her was a picture of terror, and she stared back with wide eyes as livid red nail marks from no seen assailant appeared on her cheeks.

_\- You owe us -_

Wavering like a heat haze on the horizon, coming ambiguously like a face in a dream, the nearest blur of icy wind formed features. She hung in the air, wafting gently on the breeze, but seeming to grow more solid every second.

“Danny?”

Her hair floated wildly and a bloody mess trailed over her torso. She seized hold of Laura, pinning her from behind, and sent Carmilla's stumbling lunge flying into the wall. Her lips whispered into Laura's ear, so close that almost she could feel her teeth. A sort of lethargy sank into Laura's mind so that even Carmilla's cries as she tried to crawl back came from a long way off. The two sank to the ground.

_\- I've been waiting for a taste. You knew that, right? -_

She was sitting on the ground and the cold was seeping through her mind, stilling thoughts and dulling sensations. Even the pain in her leg was drifting away.

_\- A heart, Hollis. You owe me that much at least -_

Danny's hand pushed down over her chest and sank into the flesh between her ribs. Laura shuddered with the cold but found herself turning, rolling in Danny's embrace to look the woman in her pale eyes. The last vestiges of terror were fading to leave something worse, a dull sense she had known before only in the awful first days hiding in the Library, when all she had seen both sleeping and awake were the dead bodies and even Carmilla could hardly make her eat.

_\- Your fault. My compensation. Long due. -_

The dullness of fatalism choked her veins. Long due. A heart for a heart – it was only inevitable. The laws of the Underworld demanded a fair exchange. She leaned forward, let her arms relax.

“Don't look, don't look! Turn away!” But one swivel and an almost casual swat tumbled Carmilla out of reach again. Danny's hand over her chest pressed in with her nails and despite the cold there was a trickle of warmth and Laura registered, completely uninterested, that blood was running down her stomach.

“Laura, it's not her!”

_\- There is no truce with the furies -_

* * *

JP had sat back down and was fiddling with his hands as he scrolled mentally through the list of cards LaFontaine had read out to him. Now and again he reached out to touch their memories and keep them in place.

“I see it,” he said. “Some of it. Enough of it, I hope. It confirms some suspicions... last year, the Library was trying to help you and Miss Hollis gather the talismans and use them as a cage. But Ereshkigal played a different game, a gambit to free Inanna. Did you never wonder why?”

“I... did,” LaFontaine admitted, “but I was sort of fed up with gods by that point. Resorted to injectable nanobots instead.” They smiled apologetically at Lola, who rubbed the invisible but still occasionally itchy circular scar on her neck.

“And I was sort of possessed at the time,” she answered for herself.

“Indeed. But when the Dean met Laura in the pit, she knew about her deal with Ereshkigal. Did you never wonder how? Who told her?”

“She was a good guesser? She sensed the heart?”

JP shrugged. “Perhaps. Inanna raises the dead. How? If it is her sister who governs the underworld, and if her speciality is descent, by what right does she say _Ma Usella Mitutti Ikkalu Baltuti_?”

There was a thoughtful silence of mythological speculation broken only by a distant chthonic growling. “Um, JP? I think you should probably not say that right now. Just in case.” Lola caught herself pulling a hair out in tension and clenched her hands together in her lap instead. 

“But you've figured it out,” LaFontaine prompted. “Or you've remembered what the Library knows.”

He nodded vigorously, with only two nervous glances at the descending staircase. “Inanna and Ereshkigal are two. But they are one also: the Great Above and the Great Below. See how Inanna sits herself on Ereshkigal's throne, how Ereshkigal groans in pain when Inanna is hanged, how descent must always be balanced by ascent and ascent by descent.” He opened his hands. “They are one. The two goddesses are two faces of the one power: dark as the night, terrible as an army with banners.”

LaFontaine's face was submerged in frowns. 

“Hastur-”

“Hastur brought not peace but a sword. He was Dumuzi, Tammuz, Adonis. You know the stories as well as I – I think the version of the myth that was recorded by humans said he was condemned to the Underworld but exchanged places with his sister for half of the year? Yes? You never can trust mythographers.” He rolled his eyes at the inexact recording of divine complexities.

“They did miss the point where I never actually got allowed to descend,” Lola muttered. She caught the flick of JP's eyes at her Freudian slip and coloured, but LaFontaine was too absorbed in abstract thought to notice.

“Precisely. Someone wasn't filling in their prophetic dream journal properly, I do suspect. It was not that Hastur should have exchanged places with his own sister, but that he should have been exchanged between the two sisters who loved him. A perfectly ordinary event, for someone to move from one side of the mirror to the other, but Inanna would not allow it. She prepared to violate her own shadow and steal him back rather than await the next cycle of the world. The goddesses ceased to live in step with each other – it would have torn the world apart. We had to stop it, and there was no stopping it.

“Enki planned it all. If you can't make peace, make a stalemate. He persuaded men, tricked Ereshkigal, and broke Inanna into pieces: the talismans, and what was left to be implanted into a corpse to become the Dean. A shoddy compromise, but they were both alive and prevented from following through their war of cancellation and so it held. For a while.

“Inanna was not broken enough. The Dean managed to shake herself loose. We tried – the Library and I – to restore the talismans to you and Miss Hollis and Miss Karnstein to bind her. But Ereshkigal wished something else: she wanted the war to resume, she was tired of the frozen stalemate and wanted war once more. So Inanna got free, and Miss Hollis put her back together again.”

“And saved the world.”

“Only temporarily. As I believe you have surmised by now, she lent her heart to the Dean after the spell to awaken Hastur had been performed. The thing we sought to prevent has occurred, and when the pendulum is pushed one way, it must of necessity swing back. Ereshkigal is treading the same footsteps as Inanna in the opposite direction. She rises to pillage the heavens and snatch Hastur down again.” 

He scratched his head and frowned. His head cocked to one side like he was listening to something in the far distance he was anxious not to miss.

“There is, however, one advantage unknown to us in those days, and that is the path having been trod before. Inanna and Ereshkigal's powers are travelling the same familiar warpaths as last time, and therein lies a chance.”

Lola looked up to see JP's blindfolded face turned unerringly on her. “You mean me, don't you?” she asked.

“I mean you, Miss Perry. You are at the very forefront of the goddess on earth. As Ms Belmonde is on the other side. All those forces, uncontrollable and without circumference, come to a point in you.”

“You do flatter me, JP.” That was a combative reaction born of weeks flinging back every remark from Mattie. He looked mildly confused at her words.

“Oh, my apologies for being unclear. I meant to say that all those forces come to a point in you because you are the fragile gateway through which they will tear a rent in reality and burn all before them.”

“Ah.”

“But this is to our advantage. Inanna and Ereshkigal are two, but they are also one. They wish to reconcile, they wish it at the most fundamental level, though they cannot – will not – recognise it. Neither can truly destroy the other for then they would destroy themselves. And so if they can be brought together entirely, without holding back reserves or evading the fight, they will expend all their energies maintaining a balance and find at the end themselves to be alive and at peace again.”

Lola felt the conclusion rising to the surface but asked anyway. “And this means...”

“You must reach Ms Belmonde. You must let Inanna possess you entirely and yet you must reach her at the very moment she allows Ereshkigal to possess her entirely. And you must not break apart.”

“The last time she touched me the Library shattered.”

“Yes. That is why it could not have worked last time. You will drive each other apart. We could not contain it the first time, when she descended like the setting sun soaking bloody light across the landscape. But the twin goddesses of heaven and hell are not the only ones with high priests and here in the centre of the Library - which is to say in the belly of Enki – we can make you a space that will hold things together. Perhaps enough for two people. And therefore, enough for the two that possess you to unite again.”

Lola looked from him to LaFontaine and back again.

“Consider it a peace made by ambassadors riding ahead of the armies,” he suggested, which helped only a tiny bit. A thought flickered across his face. “Although that may be less easily done than I thought. I do recall you and Ms Belmonde rather despise each other's company, which may have undesirable effects.”

She said nothing, so LaFontaine said it for her. “Uh, Jeep? That might not be so much of a problem at the moment.”

“I understand your determination, but we must allow for Miss Perry's antipathy towards-”

Lola stared at her feet as LaFontaine increased the hinting a couple of notches and squeezed his arm. “No, Jeep. Just... I don't think they've got a problem there any more.”

“There's been some, um, union already,” Lola said to her shoes.

“Oh..? Oh. _Oh._ ” Even JP's voice sounded red. “Well. Um. Unexpected, I may say. So. Might I offer my congratulations?”

“Not _that_ much union, JP.”

From down below came the sound of grinding of stone on stone. Two of the three looked round to see that the loose papers scattered within reach of the descending stairwell were ruffling in a wind coming from below.

“I have to go down there?” Lola asked. “Again?”

JP's smile was sad but sure. “I am sorry, Miss Perry. I fear Ms Belmonde has been taken possession of and is on her way up. And everything that is done engenders a reflection.”


	12. Coincidentia Oppositorum

The rig stood in one of the rooms leading directly off from the top of the pit. During the Corvae's occupation of the campus, students not digging fast enough had been hanged by their ankles over the great chasm for all to see, but JP's personal gallows was kept aside from public viewing. The floor had been washed clean by the Austrian soldiers who discovered it but the equipment itself was still in place.

“Jeep-” 

There was bile in LaFontaine's mouth. Even after the scrubbing, nothing could erase the smell hiding under the disinfectant.

“It's not as bad as it looks. I assume from your tone it looks bad. You, I take it, will not be sending too much current through and can probably tape the electrodes to my wrists rather than stab me with wires.” JP waved vaguely at the obscene apparatus. “And remove anything that looks like it's improperly earthed, I recall I built up some serious static.”

LaFontaine gingerly poked the array of struts and shackles threaded through by wires. It was horrible. But if you pulled the red wire and watched where the connections shook - it was familiar. 

“I believe the Dean copied the basic design from your implanting me in this body,” JP said when they aired this thought. “But there were a lot of modifications. Can you help me in, please?”

He settled onto a sort of cradle in the middle that had probably once been part of dentist's chair. There were four primary connections bundled together at the different corners, two small ones for the arms and two thick ones for the legs. A thin strip of mesh went around his head. LaFontaine touched it and immediately regretted doing so.

“Jeep, are you sure this is going to work? I don't like throwing my friends into something unkno- well okay. I don't like throwing my friends into something without a least a working hypothesis. Or possibly a pulse rifle. All this Inanna and Ereshkigal being one thing – look, I don't understand it. Do you mean they are literally one being? Or do you mean that they're two but sort of fused? Or is it a metaphor for something cosmic? Or something else?”

JP digested the options. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes, it is those things.”

“Okay, I walked into that one. But if they're the same, how can they act against each other?”

“They are not the same, LaFontaine. They are two. But they are one also. It is not so difficult – they are like everything else in the world which exists only in and of its opposite. They are wholly separate and wholly identical.”

His face was so damned calm, lying there as if the last time he'd been strung up here he hadn't lost his thoughtful pale eyes.

“Philosophy was never my subject,” LaFontaine muttered. They pushed hair away from their forehead. “You'll need to do me a diagram. Or, well, maybe not a visual diagram, but you could describe how it all looks.”

“I cannot. There is no way to see it all, any more than you could look north at the same time as looking south.”

LaFontaine ground their teeth. There was something unpleasant about the implied question. “Like... like you cannot see out of the back of your head. Even if you turn around.”

A smile. JP looked relieved. “You have nearly understood. I know you don't like paradoxes – they are too much like contradictions. I understand because it is the same for me. I find them horrifying. My mind goes back and forth between the two extremes and cannot reconcile them. Is it not the same for you?”

LaFontaine nodded. Magic and science. Logic and repressed squishy feelings. One of which was probably well overdue at this point.

“Well then. You hold fast to one end, and I shall the other.”

“Pairs of things-”

“But it is not pairs of things, my dear LaFontaine. It is that things are two. Indivisibly. The cathode and the anode; the trough and the crest; the sunlight and the shadow. The way up - and the way down. They hold the world together by grasping it at both ends, but they must pull in opposite directions to do so. And we, who are in the middle, see only the struggle and the momentary shudders of imbalance.” 

He raised his hand to their cheek and found it without hesitation. “So I suggest we commence wiring. We have a world to hold together, you and I.”

There was little enough to do on the connecting front. JP – or the Library, somewhere in the back of his skull – seemed to have a good idea of what was needed. Behind the gallows was an array of computer screens and a keyboard. LaFontaine typed out the recited instructions.

“You will have to leave soon.”

“What?”

“You must promise me you will leave. I could not allow you to endanger yourself. I must find a suitable centre point to form the pinch in the hourglass. And when I have rearranged the Library's rooms around us, you must go out by the front door and not look back. The way up will be easy. You must do this, please. For me.”

They shuffled their feet and considered the possible options. “All right. But the moment things go quiet, I'm coming in after you.”

JP's smile was beautific. “I would expect no less. Are we ready?”

“Almost.” They tightened the last strap and clicked the rig into operational mode. “Jeep, you know I'm not good at the feelings thing, but there's something I've got to say and I don't know how.” One of the racks of lights lit up and one of his hands jerked convulsively. “Actually, this was probably not the moment I should have chosen.”

His face softened, and LaFontaine watched the words forming on his smiling lips. “I know. Consider it said. Consider it reciprocated.”

They kissed him, once, gently, and started the programme running.

The Library warped. They had seen the results of this before, and even set up an Ethernet cable through one of the non-Euclidean network ports, but being present to see a reshuffle was something new. They remembered the way they used to stand on the central pillar of a roundabout when they were a child and let Perry spin it faster and faster around their still position in the centre. Except here the building and the pit and every tunnel and intersecting Escher-like gallery was tesseracting and folding and passing through itself as well as spinning. 

Finally all was still. The rig with the wired-in JP was positioned on one of the mezzanine galleries overlooking the Great Hall at the entrance to the building, except now there was no sunlight coming in through the tall front windows but only the dank greenish light of the great pit. They were in place as the pinch in the hourglass.

There was one more button to press and that was the job done. And JP was trapped.

“Hey, Jeep? You know when I said I'd leave you here? I was so lying.”

* * *

Lola took the stairs very carefully one at a time. She didn't really have a clear notion of where she was going other than down. The main pit – the big excavation opening up like funnel in the middle of the campus – was the obvious place if JP was to do his thing, but how to get to it?

The pit of her stomach had gone through nervousness and fear and now she felt oddly calm. There was a goddess in her brain and she was going to let herself be possessed having been in rehabilitation for less than a year after the last one. She had recently acquired a lover, who was a vampire and currently of unknown whereabouts somewhere at the bottom of the hellpit with a second goddess in her brain, or possible the reflection of the first one. And all her friends were separated and probably in danger of their lives. So this was the moment when she could stop worrying about the worst happening because it already had.

She came out and blinked in the sudden shaft of distant sunlight from above. The pit opened up around her.

A great central shaft, two hundred feet across, with a rickety wooden walkway spiralling around and down like the threading on a corkscrew. Up above there was the fuzzy mess of light and shadow which was the shattered remains of the Lustig. Here and there on the sides were great rents opening onto caves, galleries, cellars and – thanks to her screaming having broken through the barriers - the Library. She tried to make some sense of how this place related to the Library building, before spotting the familiar and disturbingly red glowing lights of the Great Reading Room coming from two different directions at once. Non-Euclidean, as LaFontaine would say. Lola had stopped maths before getting to that point. She felt strongly that parallel lines should remain at respectable distances from each other.

She found her way onto the spiral walkway and proceeded carefully, watching one foot in front of the other, before realising that she was concentrating so much on where she was going and how she was doing it only to avoid thinking about what she had to do next. 

“Inanna,” she said. “Are you... there?”

There was no reply, and she wasn't sure whether she should have felt stupid for expecting one.

“Um. Ms Morgan? Ms Dean sir?”

This was, if anything, productive of an even deeper and less responsive silence.

She thought about Mattie lying on the ground in her garden, thrown back by the force of the goddess's possession. There had been the rage and the triumph running through her veins. What would raise the goddess now, if she needed it to happen before running into her sister? A year of practising keeping everything like that out had not exactly prepared her for this. Nothing in her life had – ah. But that was very much the point.

A deep breath. Gathering all the painful memories, all the things that had ever made her feel small and insignificant. She brought up the day after she had banished Tythia. She had got up late – seven o'clock – and had a shower and then laid out her clothes. And the joy had gone out of all of it. Nothing had got the tension out of her shoulders. The floral, Wicca-y, magic sigil-covered dresses were useless now. 

“Be normal,” she'd muttered experimentally. “Just be normal. Sort yourself out.” And that had been that, increasing in volume over the years until she'd discovered that being normal and small and unremarkable hadn't kept her safe any more than courting the wonderful positive vibrations of the Universe had.

She focused on the bitterness of that morning. And of all the mornings afterwards. And of all the times when the world had been out of her control. How she wanted to bring it all in order again, how she wanted to drive everything scary and messy away so that she could get back to feeling like Lola again and not like Perry the anxious control freak. The wheels turning, the endless wheels of the anxiety getting faster and faster like a chariot as she got more and more wound up and her cheeks got redder and redder, till she wanted to scream. Till she wanted to roar with the heat of humiliation and embarrassment.

One last fragment of her insistent mental commentary pointed out that this was a little over-dramatic, but there was a smell in the air now of ashes and dry clay, wafting up from below and her steps down the spiral staircase were hurrying faster and faster like she was racing something.

From down below was a grinding and a crunching, as of stone dragging against stone or an innumerable line of feet tramping one after the other. She could hear it suddenly, clearly, as she could not have before.

And that meant Mattie as well. Mattie who made her angry, made the blood rush to her cheeks. All the heat and the annoyance and the verbal battles, the clash of swords and spears. Lola felt her mind beginning to run away with her. Swords and spears. And chariots, drawn by lions. And roses. Roses for Mattie who made her angry and was beautiful as the night and terrible as an army with banners. She brought the smell of her skin to the surface of her mind, the storm and the thunder it had echoed last night.

She didn't need to pull the cards out of her pocket this time. Above the Chariot bearing down, below Death rising up and both of them bound together, turning on the Wheel of Fortune with the Hanged Man head over heels in the middle.

She came to the door leading from the well-uncovered fifth seal level to the more snaking and narrow galleries that led to the sixth and seventh. But the door opened not into the dank dark of a mine filled with dripping water but into the Library's great entrance hall that should have been right on the surface with doors open to the South Lawn. The great windows were dark and she had entered in through the door that should have opened onto the daylight campus. Behind her they swung shut, and a lock clicked.

One of the pillars before her had a brass plaque, one line longer than Lola had seen it before:

_JP Armitage_   
_High Priest of Enki_

_1853 - 1874_   
_and 2015_   
_and 2016_

_Oh time, thy pyramids._

She shuddered, a little off-balance as one of her read the cuneiform fluently and the other did not. The one who did not read heard the clinking and whirring in the rafters above but did not let the other look up. The long gallery before her, stepping gently down on the route to the stacks, was filling with advancing shadows.

Whispering and half-formed shapes rose and fell in the haze. Somewhere the clanging of a damaged bell. From out of the shadows arose a woman shape, tall and beautiful, with hands that were claws and a mouth stretched wide over fangs. She seemed to wear a crown woven of the darkness itself.

Two sentences tried to force themselves out of Lola's mouth at the same time and jammed against each other, struggling for control of her vocal cords.

“Mattie,” she whispered. The bell sounded again and she thought Mattie might have twitched her lips in response, but all that she heard was a hissing and a growling.

Above them all the gallows lit up in a halo around JP's head. 

Lola took a step forwards. There was a feeling of thickness to the air in this place. It pushed against her as she paced towards the centre of the room. Something repelled at her. But it was not the harsh cleaving that had split the Library in two only an hour before, but muted, turned down. As if this was neutral ground between her and her enemy.

Lola let her own words fade away. Others needed to be said. 

“If a girl jumps up, Sister Mine, she falls back down.”

“So if she were to stumble forward, would she fall back, My Sister?”

Scorn for the woman who would not bow her head.

“Who is _this_ who is coming?” Inanna spat out.

“Saw _you_ coming,” hissed Ereshkigal. “See you going.”

Perry felt rage. It grew growling inside her, snapping at its chain. Her mind was filled with chasing and hunting and battle. Blood and war and power and worship. She would take, and all would love her and tremble. Blood glistened in her footsteps and she tore the a strip from her dirty sleeves to bind her hair. 

Matska grew grey. Her heart froze into bone, her eyes were as cold as dead ashes. It was fate and dust in her mind, and endurance of things done. A deathly quiet. She pulled the flower from her buttonhole and it withered before it hit the floor. 

Perry rose on the tide of Inanna. She was there in the centre of the storm, overwhelmed by it – and yet she was the still centre of the whirlwind. It summoned her to defeat death, to rule in triumph and glory on a golden throne high up above the cities. Flapping of wings and roaring of lions followed her. She pushed her thumb into the scratch at her neck and walked downwards instead.

Mattie could feel the pull of the grave. Ereshkigal spread out, filling the low places. Spilling bogs, the formless countries under mist, low sucking roots and endings below the earth. She bit down on the unhealed cut on her lip and walked upwards. The mouthless legions behind her followed.

Perry opened her mouth further than it would go and roared.

The god in Perry fought to throw back Matska, the god in Matska strove against Perry. The creatures following their footsteps reeled in the turmoil, crashing of chariots and wailing of winds, black feathers whirling in cyclones and vines thrusting through the shattered floorboards. It threw them, they flew back.

Inanna saw her reflection rise to meet her and flinch.

Ereshkigal watched her shadow half-turn as if to flee.

Everything drove them apart, but step by step and clinging desperately to the hope given them by the lost and blind who had no direction, they pushed on through the pinch in the hourglass where they both could exist at once. Thunder and lightning and the breaking apart of the order of the world as each thing strove against its opposite.

Matska Belmonde took hold of her hand. Though the echoes of the revolt sounded in stone and bronze, Lola Perry raised herself up and pressed their lips in a kiss and it all came together. The balance was met, the gods united, the floor cracked and shaking as the Library shattered with the effort. From the vaulted ceiling came the snapping of cables and the suspended body that tumbled down swung loose and heels over head, dancing with one leg bent on the underside of the upright world.

* * *

Carmilla could almost hear the bones grinding in her snapped ankle when the _thing_ that wore Danny's face threw her aside and began sinking her claws into Laura. She dropped her head backwards dizzily into waiting fingers pulling at her own hair.

Danny was the only visible shape of the winds that had blown down the passage from the Seventh Gate, but all over the rubble-strewn corridor eddies of air were blowing and when you began seeing some of them as hands and blowing hair you saw them everywhere, always out of the corner of your eye. There was something on her back now, plucking at her neck as she struggled to get up again.

A wave of pain went through her and blew the mental cobwebs away. Laura. She grit her teeth. The Danny-shape was strong but not focused on anything else save Laura, and like all the gossamer shadows she had appeared from behind, but was so much stronger than anything that assailed Carmilla. But she hadn't been, until Laura looked her in the eye.

Something understood. Carmilla stood up, letting the gibbering shades scrabble at her in vain. Her ankle was agony, even with all the weight possible on her good right foot. Staggered forward two steps, wavered and almost fell. But the thing's hands were digging into Laura chest and there was blood and she had to do it. She gritted her teeth, bent her knees, and-

\- was knocked forward by a blast that rocked the corridor. She landed somewhere with Laura and the creature that was like Danny. From all around in the shaking and rocking was a maelstrom of sound: thunder, lions, chariot wheels, an endless crashing of stone on stone. The wind came, the same wind tasting of ashes and dry clay, but this time it blew backwards, pulling the loose dust of the corridor with it, down towards the Seventh Gate. 

Everything dissolved into a chaos of hands and faces, snatching, grabbing, pulling and tugging. Something cold was biting her, and then something warm flailing until by the knowledge in her hands she formed the shape that was Laura and pressed herself into it.

“Don't look, creampuff. Look at me instead.” The wind shrieking down the passage pulled the half-formed figures with it, but the one that was Danny clung on, pawing at Laura's back with cold hands biting with nails.

Laura's eyes were unfocused. Carmilla shifted their position so that her own back was against the wall. She enfolded Laura in the tightest hug she could, their chins resting on each other's shoulders. In front of her, and behind Laura, Danny's form wavered and snarled and tried to bend a mouth to her ear. Carmilla covered it.

“No, no. Look at me. Not that thing. Don't turn round. You don't need to. I've got your back, right? And you trust me, right?”

“Carm?” Laura's voice was tenuous and full of tears but it was there.

“I'm here. My turn to save you with a damn fortune cookie motto.”

There was the hint of a giggle, and the snarling face of red hair momentarily lost coherence before launching itself into a gargantuan effort to break free of the current pulling it towards the gate. A hand lunged, but Carmilla slapped it back and this time she was the stronger.

“Nice claws, that pretend Xena. She had me going for a moment. But that's just your over-active imagination, cupcake. Big Red never acted like that, not the real her. That's the kind of thing you'd see if you were having a nightmare about someone turning evil. The kind of thing you'd dream about if you thought it was your fault that she got twisted up for a while.

“Listen to me, cupcake. There are faces back there behind you. You know where they'll take you, you've been there. And I know. And I know it hurts. But you can't go back. Because what's behind you isn't really them. Mattie said our regrets wait for us in that place, but remember Danny as you knew her. Do you regret all that? All of her? Do you regret her courage? Her loyalty? She was a loss worth regretting, but she was worth far more than that. Don't remember her just for what went wrong.

“Whatever you loved in that girl isn't back there. Wherever she is now, she's there fully. Not that shrieking echo of a regret.” Slowly, the wind lessened. “Listen. It's quiet.”

It was quiet, except for Laura taking gulps of air between her sobbing and the creaking of timbers as the Library settled itself.

“Now get up. We're going back up and you're not looking back any more than I am.” She crawled across the floor, leaving Laura only for as long as it took to retrieve their abandoned crutches. “Legs like ours, it'd be a crime not to show them off, hey? Even if there's only two good ones between the pair of us.”

“We do seem to go up and down this pit a lot, Carm. It's becoming a habit.”

“Yeah. Least we haven't got a boulder to push, hey?” She pushed an unsteady kiss into Laura's cheek. “But one more time will be fine if you're with me, and as long as we got up every time we go down. On we go.”

The Library was bent round itself in a twisted chaos. They passed the Second Seal before the Third and then somehow there was the Great Hall both down at the bottom of the pit and also opening onto the South Lawn. Throughout everything was debris, scattered wood and rubble, walls caved in with fallen books, discarded contraptions of metal and cables with disturbingly bloodied ends. Laura and Carmilla picked their way between all of it.

They came out in the sunshine. The gates of the old Lustig were shattered, the slats of the guardhouse lying broken and ragged. Somewhere off in the middle of the campus, people in green were hurrying forward towards the entrance.

Mattie sat on the grass with her face streaked in soot and ash. She smiled weakly when she saw Carmilla. Perry lay in her lap, hands scratched and bloody. Laura's heart wrenched at the sight, but then she opened her eyes and through the exhaustion there was a peace that had not been there in all the time Laura had known her. 

LaFontaine sat curled over a huddle of blankets. As they came closer it resolved itself into JP Armitage – blind, half conscious, smiling as the sun lit up his face. LaFontaine had crudely splinted his arms and legs together from their breaking in the centre of the whirlwind.

Carmilla and Laura found a fence post to lean against and the two slid down, coming to rest propping each other up.

“There. What did I tell you? Two good legs between the both of us. That's enough to walk on.”


End file.
